Kevin Bronson on February 9th, 2021

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You never know quite what singer-songwriter Melody Federer has up her sleeve. In the past year, her credits include the sizzling alt-rocker “This Town,” the country-fied single “The Wonder Years” and more collaborations with the legendary Burt Bacharach, “The Great Divide” and “The Sun Also Rises.”

This week, what’s up her sleeve is what’s on it: a battered heart.

Her new pop song “I Hate Love” joins the multitude of anti-Valentine’s Day jams that are more about self-loathing than the foibles of romance.

For her foray into the universe of alt-pop, she recruited Absofacto, who produces the tune along with Nathan Barlowe and Kosuke Kasza. “Melody sent me the demo and it was so rough around the edges and unfiltered and captured exactly what she’s going through… kinda like her personality exploded into the song,” Absofacto says. “I just wanted to take that mess of emotions and put it on a pedestal without cleaning it up at all. We kept all that raw original stuff and built it up from there.”

Federer sings woundedly about driving the streets of rainy Seattle and hearing pop songs that remind her of her former paramour; she’s torn between emotions, heart in disrepair, threatening to block phone calls and to take out restraining orders. It’s a bawl of confusion, of course, and the chorus makes clear where the problem actually lies: “Please don’t call, I need time to fix myself.”

||| Stream: “I Hate Love”