Alt-country-rock artist Elly Hopkins digs deep to purge the ghosts of anxiety.
Elly Hopkins – Animal
‘Animal’ is the second release from singer Elly Hopkins’ forthcoming 5-track debut EP of the same name. The first single, ‘Cecile’, released in June, marked a waypoint in her musical career, as it was the first track written with a full band as a solo artist in her own right. Rather than being a vocal gun for hire, the former jazz singer has now laid down her roots with her honest and autobiographical songwriting, finding a new home and nurturing ground.
The dusky garage rock laced with a whiskey-soaked vocal of ‘Cecile’, told of the feelings of inadequacy and anxiety brought about through the scythe of social media and introduced us to Hopkins’ style and motivation. And with ‘Animal’ we have a not-too-dissimilar beast.
The ruminations are still very much the substance of the track, as Hopkins explores vulnerability and fallibility through an electric blues, dark cowboy sound. It’s a track that journeys metaphorically into the desert but at the same time into the soul to discover what exists there and return with a level of acceptance. With slide guitars and a slow, marching beat, Hopkins enters a wilderness, with shimmering organ on the horizon, as if to find her spirit animal, ritualistically embracing what it is to be human and animalistic, governed by instinct and prone to imperfection:
“Deep within I know I am man and woman, I am it all, And I fall”. It is a song of yearning and of re-connection. Digging deep below the layers and strictures of modern technology, represented by big, dramatic metal guitar chords to re-discover the imperfect beauty that lies within all of us.
“I was sat at the kitchen table, stewing, spiralling, and feeling stuck. I picked up the guitar and out of the frustration came these lyrics, calling me out of it. It’s sometimes easy to forget that as humans we are nature, not separate from it. We are animals.”
Hopkins’ voice is both rasping, raw and sagacious; a clarion call full of experience and guidance and yet it can effortlessly switch to fragility, to inferiority, to a delicate whisper in an unforgiving world. Her lyrics, though entrenched in a very personal subjectivity, are deeply universal and two tracks into her new incarnation as a solo artist and bluesy storyteller, she seems more than comfortable in her own skin.
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Words by Andrew Guttridge
