Harkin announces debut solo LP with lead single "Nothing The Night Can’t Change"

Having spent the past few years touring with the likes of Sleater-Kinney, Wild Beasts, Flock of Dimes, and Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett, Harkin has today unveiled new single "Nothing The Night Can't Change", a glimpse of her forthcoming self-titled debut LP.

""Nothing The Night Can’t Change" is a love song inspired by the North of England," says Harkin. "Anyone that’s been on a night out in Leeds, or any of those places knows all the switches get flipped after dark. The romance and chaos of this song belongs to those nights."

Speaking about working with Warpaint's Stella Mozgawa and Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Harkin adds, "Jenn and Stella were both old tour friends of mine but had never met before our recording session together. By the end of day one they were finishing each other’s jokes and, miraculously, a bunch of the album’s foundational live tracks are first or second takes. The whole recording and mixing process only took 16 days total, but I ended up working in studios across three different time zones, so that spontaneity was essential to keeping the spark alive in the final song as it travelled with me. Jenn and Stella are as good as it gets and I’m hugely grateful."

Expanding on her forthcoming record, Harkin says, "I was living in a Peak District cottage beneath the moors when I started this record, but it mostly formed as I took it with me round the world in the slipstream of the music of my friends. It was wildly rewarding, but what left the most indelible mark on this album was how jarring that time in my life was. Many of these songs grew from the tension between opposites. Between the wilderness and the city, between self-examination and communal ecstatic, night and day, love and shame. Growing up in the North you can be on the moors and at a warehouse party in the same day if you have bus fare. Sonically, I was searching for a sound that reflected that experience, that combined the eeriness of the English countryside with the pace of the mechanized world."

Harkin adds, "It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of being able to put this record out, and in many ways I’m grateful for the fractured process that led to it, as it has allowed me the space to reflect and create something that is truly without compromise. Founding Hand Mirror is such a big part of that. Culture has always been our personal scaffolding, and with Hand Mirror, we want to build something that can in turn provide that support to others. This album is as much to honour my hard-won sense of self as it is the music that has made the world porous for me in ways I could never have hoped for."

Tracklist:

1. Mist on Glass
2. Nothing The Night Can't Change
3. Decade
4. Up To Speed
5. Bristling
6. Dial It In
7. Red Virginia Creeper
8. Sun Stay With Me
9. New France
10. Charm and Tedium