While Marika Hackman was making her fifth album Big Sigh, she kept thinking about, well, big sighs. “It is quite cringingly something that me and my partner say to our dogs quite a lot when they do a big sigh,” the British singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “Which then was being said at me quite a lot. [The title] was actually born out of there being a lot of sighing happening during the making of the record.” Because creating this album, says Hackman, was anything but easy. After 2019s Any Human Friend, a “cocktail of different factors”—including the pandemic, a lack of inspiration, and “a constant hum of stress”—stunted her creativity. “It was like crawling through mud,” she says of trying to claw it back. “It was the biggest struggle I have had with that aspect of my career since I started.” Yet she found an upside, eventually. “Once you have got that far down the rabbit hole, it was like, "I am here now and I am going to make this record exactly how I want to make it. Even if that takes more time, money, stressful situations, I cannot be half-arsed about this,” she says.
Listen to the opening moments of Big Sigh, and it quickly feels like this is going to be a different kind of Marika Hackman record. After the largely guitar-led indie of Any Human Friend and 2017 s, I am Not Your Man, Big Sigh features swirling strings, piano, instrumental interludes, and horns, but also distorted vocals, industrial sounds, and electronic music. Plus, plenty of dark, arresting lyricism, and the minor-chord melodies that Hackman has always excelled in (“I feel like I have resting bitch face and I have resting sad voice,” she deadpans). It is raw, immersive, and cinematic—both a leap forward and a culmination of everything Hackman has done before. “It feels like a bit of a turning point for me as an artist,” she says. “It feels very honest. I am not trying to hide behind anything on this record at all. It is exploratory, but in the way that a child explores—a really pure, honest exploration.” It also feels like another big sigh. “Once the record was done, the sense of relief, the whole process that it had taken to go through, it felt like a big sigh,” she says. “The song subjects, the themes, the sonics of it—it was like this big, big release.” Read on as Hackman takes us inside the making of her fifth album, one song at a time.
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