Vivid, visceral, and susceptible, Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s “Your Ex” is an intimate indie pop eruption of ardour and ache that aches from the within out, and a wide ranging, irresistibly catchy and cathartic standout taken off her new EP, ‘Huge Purple’!

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Stream: “Your Ex” – Katie Gregson-MacLeod

No quantity of tenderness can clean over the turbulence – the sheer weight, and the uncooked ache – on the coronary heart of Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s August anthem.

However tender sonics and heat melodies actually assist to make this a second to recollect.

There’s no simplifying the multiplicity of feelings we would expertise within the presence of a accomplice’s ex. The mere concept of such an individual’s existence – of their very being – requires us to acknowledge and settle for that the particular person you liked, as soon as cherished another person; and that’s simply the summary concept of them. Carry them into the identical room as you and your accomplice, and the floodgates would possibly very effectively be a dam manufactured from feathers.

However all hell doesn’t break unfastened in “Your Ex” – at the least, not on the skin.

Quite, Gregson-MacLeod’s lovely new track is an inside reckoning with one’s personal emotional fragility and volatility; with insecurities and anxieties acquainted to hundreds of thousands, but typically left unsaid – and positively unexplored, to an extent, in track. That is, at the least partly, what Scottish exhausting rock band Nazareth had been singing about all these years in the past (and sure, we all know it’s an Everly Brothers cowl): Love hurts.

And to be clear, this isn’t a breakup track; nobody is splitting up as a result of your accomplice’s ex is instantly again within the image (although that’s actually a worry, looming ominously like a darkish cloud at the back of the artist’s thoughts) – till they… possibly… are? Maintain that thought; don’t let it go simply but.

Typically it simply helps to speak out your heavy emotions, in order that they cease weighing so closely on you and also you alone. That is one such second of cathartic, therapeutic songwriting: Vivid, visceral, and susceptible, “Your Ex” is an intimate indie pop eruption of ardour and ache that aches from the within out.

As a result of no quantity of upbeat pop music, irrespective of how charming, irrespective of how catchy, can fill the cracks in our minds and in our hearts.

Noticed her on the merch stand
Speaking to her ex-man
Her ex-man was you
Brief blonde hair
Just like the lady who simply sang
The lady who simply sang was me

Launched August 18, 2023 through Sony Music / Arista Data, “Your Ex” is a soul-stirring singalong able to uplift even essentially the most bruised and damaged of us. Hopeless romantics beware: This will break you down… however it simply would possibly construct you again up once more.

The lead single off Scottish singer/songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s third EP Huge Purple (out October 13, 2023) sees the 22-year-old artist, who loved a breakout with final 12 months’s songs written for piano EP, channeling a world of intense, deeply intimate, and sophisticated feelings out into the open. She holds nothing again in a track that shines an enormous, vivid mild on all these ideas we’d a lot somewhat bury than converse aloud – and due to the vitality and spirit she infuses into her efficiency, we come away from “Your Ex” feeling seen and heard, impressed and invigorated.

All instructed, it actually does take an empath to put in writing an empathic track.

And whereas we already fell head over heals for Gregson-MacLeod final 12 months (she was one in every of Atwood‘s High Artist Discoveries of 2022), “Your Ex” reinforces that infatuation, fueling the creeping sense that she is destined for larger issues – or, as our author Minna Abdel-Gawad so eloquently put it: “Her candor and sincerity set her aside… [her] innate capability to articulate fatiguing feelings is unmatched; she sings as if she is presently residing by it, expressing anguish, anger and sorrow all of sudden…”

The “Your Ex” refrain is candid, conversational, and completely all-consuming:

And it might harm if she purchased your t-shirt
And it ended up in your flooring
In case you gave her head to ‘State Hen’
In case you stayed along with her after tour

And it might harm if
Your finest buddy cherished her
If she lived within the entrance of your thoughts
She’s match and her roots are lighter
However the mattress that you simply’re in is mine

Mine… You’re not even
Mine… Your ex-girl is okay
However the mattress that you simply’re in is mine

Gregson has beforehand defined the inspiration for “Your Ex” stemming from some discomfort and insecurities round relationship somebody with “a lingering and sophisticated” relationship with their ex.

“‘Your Ex’ was first written to make mild of a state of affairs by which a accomplice’s ex was on the scene greater than I used to be used to,” Gregson-MacLeod tells Atwood Journal. “It felt good to giggle about it, pretend some cockiness, and indulge hypotheticals and delusions simply sufficient to make enjoyable of them. I wrote the lyrics initially as a little bit of a piss-take, focusing within the first verse upon an evening the place I noticed the 2 of them interacting and observed we shared some likeness, while additionally questioning if there was a gray space there that I didn’t learn about. The aim of the track’s refrain was initially to mirror my stunning lack of insecurity about it, to make mild of all of it. Form of saying, ‘If I had been to spiral about this, these are the issues I’d think about had been occurring’, however acknowledging that in actuality, I used to be in a completely safe place the place my emotions weren’t but susceptible to being harm.”

“It was additionally the tip of a session and I primarily simply wished to put in writing a pop track referencing getting head to a comparatively obscure modern Americana track.”

Wasn’t considering ‘til you flew residence
In case you had been mendacity I’d by no means know
You may be mendacity on her sofa once more
In case you by no means name me your ex now
It was nothing or it labored out
If it was nothing how lengthy
Earlier than you’re enjoying that track
At a brand new home?

And it might harm if she purchased your t-shirt
And it ended up in your flooring
In case you gave her head to State Hen
In case you stayed along with her after tour

And it might harm if
Your finest buddy cherished her
If she lived within the entrance of your thoughts
She’s match and her roots are lighter
However the mattress that you simply’re in is mine

The second half of the track delves into darker territory; as time progresses, what as soon as appeared a foolish cloth of the creativeness takes on extra weight and potential, as this once-stable, wholesome relationship deteriorates.

“The latter half was written in a while, after I assume the state of affairs held extra weight typically and the lyric of the track turned underwritten by a extra anxious or insecure tone,” Gregson-MacLeod explains. “I left the track alone for some time and wrote the remainder of the lyrics when the connection was coming to an finish. All of a sudden, the intention behind the refrain modified for me and as a substitute the anxieties it centered upon had been real.”

It’s all that I take into consideration
Possibly it’s a pair years from now
Did we really feel it sufficient?
Did you want who I turned out to be?
And it’s all that I take into consideration
On the Fonda or the Roundhouse
Are you in search of me within the crowd
Or avoiding my eye
As I purchase an LP?

That darkish cloud she tried for therefore lengthy to carry again bursts in a musical and emotional breakdown, and all of the built-up stress and nervousness from this track (and from lived expertise) comes spilling forth in a rush of dramatic, charged sound.

“Setting the track towards a vigorous and upbeat pop manufacturing completely aligned with the lyric’s try to dismiss the narrator’s real anxieties,” Gregson-MacLeod shares, diving into her artistic resolution to pair such aching lyrics with heat, candy melodies. “As in lots of what I really like to put in writing and hearken to, I felt to correctly serve this track, the sonics needed to be in a extra pop and upbeat house. Each timbre and lyric are an try to impound and dismiss the insecurity underwriting the track.”

“Your Ex” is finally a deep-dive into our anxieties and insecurities – justified or in any other case – and the way they gnaw ceaselessly at our hearts and minds.

Speaking about it helps – clear communication and self-expression are in all probability the very best strategies in most, if not all, conditions – however simply because we’re assuaged doesn’t imply these ideas and emotions don’t exist in some type or trend. It’s good to listen to our inside turbulence and emotional turmoil expressed so superbly, and so unapologetically, by music.

Along with her Huge Purple EP out imminently, there’s little doubt that this is Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s time. The Scottish artist’s penchant for susceptible, brutally trustworthy songwriting and large, daring melodies is second solely to her innate capability to marry the catchy with the cathartic. She has the good Midas contact – all the pieces she makes is musical gold, melting over our ears and our hearts in waves of breathtaking, irresistible heat and marvel.

Huge Purple is out October 13, 2023.

And it might harm if she purchased your t-shirt
And it ended up in your flooring
In case you gave her head to State Hen
In case you stayed along with her after tour

And it might harm if
Your finest buddy cherished her
If she lived within the entrance of your thoughts
She’s match and her roots are lighter
However the mattress that you simply’re in is mine

Mine… You’re not even
Mine… Your ex-girl is okay
However the mattress that you simply’re in is mine

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Stream: “Your Ex” – Katie Gregson-MacLeod

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