The Fat Angel Sings

Emerging folk singer-songwriter Marika Hackman is off to the vast expanse of the desert in her incredibly mysterious new vid. Absolutely stunning and haunting vocals from this rising star Marika Hackman. She looks like an art student, not a former Burberry model, but three years ago, while her friend Cara Delevingne was wrapping her belted mackintosh around Eddie Redmayne, Hackman could be seen on a billboard advertising aviator sunglasses. She also appeared on the fashion label’s online Acoustic music series – a rather better showcase for her music than a poster campaign Hackman’s debut album, We Slept at Last, was issued last month. Her natural “awkwardness” translates as something else in her music. Her voice is boyish and unadorned, and her eyes-down approach looks intense rather than diffident. Her songs are full of surprising modulations that lie just on the wrong side of pretty and her guitar playing is steady as a mill-wheel. Marika Hackman mixes something ancient and modern, and typically British, in the way only Nick Mulvey has done in recent years. Her songs sound as old as peat bogs, but as smart as Radiohead. In the past two years she has toured with Laura Marling, the 1975 and alt-J, and has struck up a musical partnership with producer Charlie Andrew.