Content warning: references to sexual assault and abuse
After a year of musical silence, BEX is back with fairies, the first single from her upcoming concept EP “Away with the Fairies”. And she comes back speaking openly about what made her stop and put herself back together.
fairies is about abuse, guilt, fear and loss of trust. It opens and closes with the same question, “Oh, why don’t you feel ashamed?”, and in between the lyrics go round in circles, full of questions that have no answers and don’t seem to be looking for any. “What if you took the blame?” becomes “What if I took the blame?”. Because what happened hasn’t stayed in the past. It’s still there when she tries to sleep, when she tries to trust someone, when she tries to feel safe.
Some of the lines are hard to hear. “You’ve taken my body at a vulnerable time” is brutal precisely because of how plainly it is stated, while “You made me panic in the covers like a nightmare” turns the bed, the one place where you should feel safe, into somewhere frightening. Not even the fairies can get her out of there: when sleep finally comes, so does the nightmare.
And yet, BEX never lets the song sound defeated. fairies moves between taut indie-rock guitars, ’90s alternative rock and grunge softened by a strong melodic streak. There’s fuzz, distortion and weight, but also a strange brightness that keeps the song moving. There’s something of Soccer Mommy in the way it pairs melody with sharp guitars, although BEX pushes the sound somewhere grungier, closer to Veruca Salt or Hole at their most melodic.
Her voice follows the same path: held back in the verses, looser in the choruses, and clear even when it starts to roughen up. BEX doesn’t overplay it. She tells us what happened, and that’s enough.
That’s why fairies also ends up sounding like release, like the urgent need to let go of something that couldn’t break her. BEX shows the wound, but also how she found her way out. She spent a year away with the fairies and came back with this. The rest of “Away with the Fairies” arrives in February.
Next live dates:
November 15th: The Boileroom – Guildford
December 10th: Downstairs at The Dome – London
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