Premiere: Inanna call out into the darkness with ‘Spooky’
The indie-pop duo wander through the halls of death and uncertainty on a new song.
I attended my first funeral when I was six. It’s only a flashing memory now, but it lifted the veil on this existence, you could say. That imprint has been carried around with me like a tattoo that has lost all form and color. In 30+ years, countless more deaths have cast a bruised shadow over life, and it’s hard not to grow increasingly existential with age. It’s not that each loss punches you down (that’s expected), but it’s the frequency of it all, manifesting into this sour, ugly ghoul that you just know is waiting around the next corner. A dreamy shoegaze duo out of California, Inanna ⏤ Hank Dorsey and Hannah Stewart ⏤ seem to work out of such a cavernous darkness, as Stewart’s voice pings and echoes across shards of rock and the overwhelming blackness that seeks to taunt them before it just might swallow them alive. “Spooky,” a hauntingly aloof track, premiering today, finds the indie-pop mechanics stumbling around in the attic that borders human existence and the afterlife.
“So strange, a place is not gone when you leave / So strange, your face, all along / I miss you, do you miss me?” pokes Stewart. She wrestles with her emotionally grueling plight as a farmer tending to a withering garden, each stalk of corn cracked and brown. She’s parched for water, too, and she then turns her voice over in the silver cylinder of light that has somehow found its way into the cave with them, perplexing Stewart and Dorsey into thinking the weight will finally leave their shoulder blades. “Your lone figure and it’s calling my name / It sounds like my voice but I’ll come just the same / And now you’re gone, no one to blame,” she heaves one last breath in resignation. The melancholy is breathtakingly brutal, allowing the gloom to take root, but you’ll at least be ready for it.
On the song, Stewart tells B-Sides & Badlands over email, “The song was inspired by a string of unexpected losses. My life at the time had very few constants, so I was dealing less with the initial shock and more the extending reality that constants can and do disappear from your own life with no warning,” she says. “When my old, sort of mean, enigma of a cat died, I realized that in its simplicity, the seemingly most innocuous of losses illustrated exactly what I was trying to express…not that losing someone is heartbreaking, which, of course it is, but the more selfish side of the loss which shook me unexpectedly ⏤ loss of the illusion of constancy.”
Stewart and Dorsey, whose strengths fuse together into a fireworks display, first met during their studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. But it was last summer’s spontaneous cross-country road trip that ignited them from the inside-out and sent them careening on a majestic pathway to their first project, one that sees them unchaining their bodies from the past and finding solace in connecting to the present. “Spooky” samples the pair’s debut, an EP called What is Living Above the Light, an appropriately blood-sucking set that asks the hard questions about humanity and recovering from pain.
What is Living Above the Light drops this Friday (May 3).
Listen below:
