The Singles Bar: Tishmal can’t handle the ‘Heavy’

Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.

Anyone suffering from mental illness feels unworthy of life. It’s a sunken, swirling blackness that acts as a python ’round the throat, and you can’t ever stop it from happening. It’s a state of being that tragically afflicts far more than you might realize. In the latest research, 6.8 million adults were victims of generalized anxiety disorders, with 16.1 million bearing a major depressive disorder, crushing statistics that further confirm our harrowing reality in 2019. Everyone deserves happiness, and few are able to find a warming place of even mild solace.

Alternative pop upstart Tishmal (real name Rachel Brockbank) weaves a fragile sphere of mental illness with a new song called “Heavy,” which flickers and crackles with darkly-laced, double-webbed synths. Her voice is as lilting as it is poisonous and strikes at the skin. “Do you see me as a burden / Do you see me with regret / I don’t mean to be a martyr / But I can’t escape my head,” she cries, teardrops pouring down her cheeks and leaving trace reminders of her anguish. Through exposing her own anxiety, an unbridled unease that courses in her veins, she prompts the listener to examine their own mental capacity, with a hope to upend the stigma circling its victims like a buzzard to prey.

“I’ve been feeling so ashamed,” she later confesses before the startling and twinkling beat drops. In its lyrical simplicity, the song unfolds quite a laborious and inescapable reality. It is a magical soundscape pumping full of adrenaline, and as the storm rages, Tishmal seeks to offer some kind of relief. Depressive and anxiety disorders have wormed their way into the backbone of humanity, souring quality of life and wreaking havoc, and have left countless bodies behind. Solutions are slippery, but what we can do is express more compassion and empathy for the tragedies we might not notice on first glance. It takes time, and Tishmal lends her gentle handle to stopping further destruction.

Listen below:

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