Sometimes it’s incomprehensible how the harm from another can fuck up your entire perception of yourself. An intricately aimed pebble lodged into the gears of one’s internal clock, mucking up that innate instinct to keep going forward. This shock of instability that veers on insanity is potent in Montreal musician Ada Lea’s new single “Hurt.”
“Somebody hurt me badly, now I’m stuck in a rut / Now I don’t know my body,” she sings on the follow-up to her 2020 EP woman, here. Guitar strums and a slow, thumping drumbeat keep her words afloat as she debates whether to move back in with her parents, whether to tell her friends, whether to do anything at all. Later, strings carry the urgency of her words to another level, almost like cushioned cries of validation.
“I wanted to find a way to communicate complicated feelings using the simplest language possible,” Lea said of the track. “I came with a narrative and removed almost every detail, so as not to obfuscate the feeling—but left it open in terms of a resolution: was this hurt necessarily a bad thing?”
Watch the song’s video, directed by Monse Muro, below.
