Stream: Hand Habits, ‘Graves’

0
Hand Habits (Photo by Jacob Boll)

“Graves” is the third single from Hand Habits’ forthcoming third album, “Fun House,” which finds singer-songwriter Meg Duffy turning some pandemic pluckiness into a remarkable album. During the lockdown, Duffy was sharing a house with Sasami Ashworth (aka SASAMI) and Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), who produced and engineered the album, respectively, in the studio space Thomas has in the home.

“When the pandemic happened, everything stopped,” Duffy says. “I had been touring consistently for five years, both on my own and playing in other people’s bands, so I wasn’t really writing a lot in between. It had been full pedal to the metal in terms of traveling and scheduling, which meant I really didn’t have a lot of time to think about how I felt or really check in with myself.

“Then, when the world basically stopped, it turned out to be the longest I’ve been alone in my entire life — without being in a relationship, without being on the road, without working myself to exhaustion — and the result was really like, holy shit. I slammed on the brakes and everything psychologically that I’d been pushing down and ignoring for the past few years suddenly flew to the foreground.”

“Graves” represents one of those personal check-ins. “This song is a secret message to myself,” Duffy says, “a reminder, a conversation with grief and remembrance. A questioning of my own memory and its proximity to understanding closure.”

On the brighter tip is “Aquamarine,” a synth-pop song that spins a very personal yarn. “What originally started as a minimally arranged acoustic ballad, ‘Aquamarine’ evolved into the story of certain events in life, what informs my identity, the silence in the questions left unanswered that become the shape of understanding who I am,” Duffy says. “It was my goal to cloak some of the perils of mortality (lyrically) in a musical landscape that didn’t require the listener for a large amount of patience, to bring grief into the metaphorical club.”

The V Haddad-directed video was filmed “in my aunt’s bar and club in upstate New York,” Duffy sadds, “linking the origin and lineage themes in the song with the visuals of changing identities and characters in a space I used to wander as a teen.”

Each song is ravishing and bold in its own way, and more is sure to be discovered when “Fun House” — the follow-up to 2017’s “Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void)” and 2019’s “Placeholder” — arrives on Oct. 22 via Saddle Creek.

||| Stream: “Graves”

||| Also: Watch the videos for “Aquamarine” and “No Difference”

||| Live: Hand Habits celebrates the release of “Fun House” with a show Oct. 27 at the Pico Union Project. Tickets.