Over the past year, London-based songwriter Eaves Wilder has been unloading loose recordings onto her Bandcamp page leading up to the reveal today that a couple of these shoegaze-y singles will reappear on her debut EP Hookey, arriving March 24 via Secretly Canadian. As previewed on “I Stole Your Jumper” and “Morning Rain,” the EP will inhabit the mental space of a young woman coming of age in frustrating environments ranging from her immediate surroundings to the world at large. “I write songs imagining the person who's listening to them, which is always a quite sad, lonely 14-year-old girl,” she shares. “I want her, whoever she is, to listen and be like, ‘That is exactly what I’m going through and this person understands, and I’m not alone.”
Along with the news of the EP, Wilder is sharing another cut from the project today titled “Are You Diagnosed?,” which blazes through her experiences in the waiting rooms of the severely underfunded Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, where “the closer you are to death, the higher up the waiting list you go,” she explains. “People with eating disorders are competitive anyway, so it’s very easy to look around the waiting room, and think, ‘I need to be the most ill person here. I need to get…ill-er than the girl with the bandages on her arms, or the tube up her nose—or I’ll never get treated.”
To match the rage simmering beneath the mostly composed grunge-pop instrumental and her saccharine vocals, the track’s eerily lit visual is a nightmarish recreation of those doctor visits. Check it out below.
