The sonic architecture here is worth pausing over. Hermida and her collaborators \u2014 GRAMMY-nominated producer Riley Urick and co-songwriter Onique “Sparrow” Williams, a pair who have previously navigated the considerably smoother waters of Usher and Britney Spears \u2014 have made a sharp pivot away from the 2000s punk-pop of her earlier work. “17” plants its flag firmly in the dirt of 90s grunge, channelling the confrontational energy of Bikini Kill while threading through it the stranger, more unpredictable textures of experimental pop. It is an unusual marriage, and it mostly holds. The guitar work drives hard and low, creating a bed of sound that feels genuinely destabilising \u2014 not merely aggressive, but *unsettled*, which is precisely the correct emotional register for a song about being seventeen and furious and not entirely sure why.<\/p>
Hermida’s vocals are the centrepiece, and rightly so. The decision to keep those first raw takes \u2014 recorded on the day she was, by her own account, so emotionally charged that the feeling could not later be replicated \u2014 proves to be an act of considerable artistic courage. The voice you hear is not the voice of a performer hitting marks; it is the voice of someone who has run out of patience with the performance of being fine. There is a thickness to her delivery, a quality that British critics of a certain vintage would have called *presence* \u2014 the ineffable sense that the person singing means it more than seems reasonable or comfortable.<\/p> The thematic terrain is familiar but handled without sentimentality. The overwhelming judgement levelled at young people precisely when they are least equipped to absorb it; the grotesque expectation of adult comportment from those still assembling themselves; the particular wound of having your character misread by people who ought to know better. These are not new grievances, but Hermida articulates them with a specificity that keeps the song from collapsing into generality. She is not writing about being young. She is writing about being seventeen in a particular week, in a particular argument, with a particular quality of rage \u2014 and that precision is what separates craft from content.<\/span><\/p> The Paramore lineage is audible \u2014 “Ignorance” from *Brand New Eyes* haunts the song’s DNA \u2014 but Hermida does not simply replicate her influences. She filters them through her own temperament, which runs hotter and more impatient than Hayley Williams at her most combustible. The Bikini Kill comparison is perhaps more aspirational than fully realised, but the ambition itself is instructive. These are not soft reference points. They indicate an artist who wants to make music that *costs* something.<\/span><\/p> What the single achieves most convincingly is the sensation its maker describes as an exhale \u2014 the release of pent-up energy that comes not from resolution but from the act of expression itself. The song does not conclude so much as it dissipates, which is formally appropriate for a piece about emotions too large to be neatly processed. It is the sonic equivalent of screaming into a pillow and then lying very still in the aftermath.<\/span><\/p> Hermida is still finding the full shape of her sound, and one suspects she knows it. But “17” is the kind of imperfect, urgent, emotionally unguarded record that most artists spend years trying to make and then, once they have the technical means to make it properly, can no longer quite access. She has caught lightning in a very particular bottle \u2014 the lightning of being young and livid and unpolished enough not to care \u2014 and the result is considerably more interesting than careful.<\/span><\/p> Watch this space. And perhaps mind the noise.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/www.haileyhermida.com\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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