Harkin's "Up To Speed" is "a song about going nowhere fast"

"Up To Speed" follows on from last month's lead single "Nothing The Night Can’t Change", and was again recorded with Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa and Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner.

Expanding on the new offering, Harkin says, ""Up To Speed" is a song about going nowhere fast. I’ve been on the move for a long time now and I know it’s been something of a coping mechanism. It’s easier to feel like a tourist somewhere you actually are one. It’s about trying to convert a desire to escape into genuine propulsion rather than just a sprint into the void. That’s Jenn yelling "this is my take" at the top of the song, which I kept as it felt very apt."

On her forthcoming self-titled debut album, Harkin explains, "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."