System

If 'System' feels immediately uncompromising it's because it was never really designed for public consumption. Released under her Prewn moniker, Izzy Hagerup describes the album as a 'private journal made public'. Told across nine arresting new songs, the album chronicles a deeply personal journey through the darkness of depression, but one that's always undercut by moments of humour, selfishness and self-reflection, a push-and-pull that feels wholly distinctive. Following on 2023's 'Through the Window' LP - a collection of songs that Pitchfork hailed as a 'striking example of Hagerup's ability to sit with ugliness' - 'System' finds Hagerup crawling even deeper into the dense folds of the night. Written and recorded solely by Hagerup, mostly in long stretches of bedroom sessions that found her working through the small hours until she began to hear birdsong, the album reckons with a lot of the thoughts that tend to needle in at that time of night; guilt, shame, and self-absorption, as well as the societal pressures that sit at the root of such things.