Prewn: Through the Window

We all know that Bandcamp has been a wonderful vehicle for artists to cut out intermediaries and get their music out into the wilderness within a click of a button.

This isn’t for all artists, though. Some, spending years on end refining their songcraft, agonising over every last detail. Whether that’s the case with Izzy Hagerup or not, under the alias of Prewn, the songs that comprise of her debut album, Through the Window, have been fermenting for the better part of a decade.

Recorded periodically during the various COVID pandemic lockdowns with fellow Pelican Movement band mate, Kevin McMahon (The Walkmen, Pile et al) at his Marcata Studio, the Northampton, Massachusetts songwriter has boiled down these songs that are a series of bruising vignettes that pack one of the biggest punches of 2023.

Songwriters like Gareth Liddiard and Craig Finn have spend the last three decades writing songs that turned mundane moments into magic. So too Hagerup, who parts with gritty folk tales that spark with similar tones of Exploding In Sound label mates Bad History Month and Pile (the latter with whom she is currently on tour). And in doing so, Hagerup stumbles into the same folk-inspired punk echo system that continues to be the most interesting landscape in modern day guitar-based music.

Pile: All Fiction

Through the Window has moments which leave you shaking your head at just how good they are. Lyrically, Hagerup conjures up a gruelling sequence of hairpin turn scenarios, parting with the same snappy wordplay that adorns the pages of a literary classic.

Starting with the creeping, fingerpicking majesty of Machine – a dark tale of a protagonist commentating on their own death, permeating with an intoxicating atmosphere that leaves you short of breath (“Tell my mamma that I love her / See you Dad above the thunder / Let this be a lesson, children / Nothing lasts forever”). There aren’t many opening tracks that will be bettered this year.

But I Want More doesn’t lighten the mood, either. Inspired by Hagerup’s father’s battle with Parkinson’s disease, it’s a track festering in the pits of despair. (“God stole my will when I checked in at the door / Wrote my name took a pill and never left the god damn floor / Now I’m calling for you/ ’Cos it’s all I can do”.)

Meanwhile, the electric downer rock of Alive bristles with the kind of eddying tones Kristin Hersh served up last year with 50 Foot Wave. Again, that intoxicating feeling that seems like everything around you has frozen, and it’s down to Hagerup’s street-level spirit. It continues on Woman – a lo-fi meander that sees Hagerup’s channeling her inner Martha Wainwright from earlier in century, but this time alongside the ghosts of Jefferson Airplane, with medieval sonics that ripple the curtains like a summer breeze.

Still steeped in ’60s reverence, the wonky slacker rock of I’m Gonna Fry All the Fish in the Sea taps into a similar vein, but Hagerup gives it a gnarled, punk-inspired edge (“I’ve got what I need/ I fried all the fish in the motherfucking sea”).

Bad History Month: True Delusion EP

Then there’s Perfect World. An exquisite folk tale taking the mantle from Jessica Pratt with more spell-binding wordplay in what is up there with the best songs of the year; the protagonist revelling in the malaise in a bid to tear the world apart (“If a billion people were looking at me / Mamma you would be so proud of me / I’m quite the sight to see”).

The last two tracks keep up the momentum. Firstly, with the ramshackle rocker, Shiela. Something you may have associated with the fractured folk of early Devendra Banhart as Kevin McMahon applies similar recording methods to that of Pile’s All Fiction. So too on closer number Burning Up. A collage of sounds seemingly reversed engineered with a raw, electric thrum that ends the album, with Hagerup sauntering down that abandoned road towards destination unknown.

Through the Window is an experience. Dissecting layers down to the core, it’s like line editing a novel with a watchful eye. Every single moment is crucial, and that’s why Hagerup has taken so long to shape these songs. All of which contain messages that have been conceived from the fault lines. That house of cards threatening to topple down at any moment. That’s what makes these songs so exciting and essential. Moments like these are the reasons why we choose art. That bid to let it consume us.

And that’s exactly what Prewn’s Through the Window does.

Through the Window is out now via Exploding In Sound. Purchase from Bandcamp.