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From Chicago
Recommended if you like Wednesday, Fiona Apple, Giant Drag
Up next European/UK tour kicks off in May
A word that Prewn, AKA Izzy Hagerup, often uses to describe her music is “dissociation” – the disconnected emotional state embodied by many of the Chicago-born musician’s songs. It’s not an impression anyone would be left with from listening to her bitter, potent take on indie-rock. Hagerup’s guitar lines snake as they thrash; her balladry is grimy and expansive, steered by febrile vocals that recall mid-period Fiona Apple and the drone of the cello she played as a kid. Unexpected moments lurk, such as the shadowy slip into trip-hop on recent single Dirty Dog.
“One thing I really value about music is that it’s one of a few ways that I can really connect to emotion, even if the emotion is feeling disconnected,” Hagerup says. “Day to day, I’m pushing those feelings away. Picking up a guitar, you could write about all the beautiful, happy things, but there’s something that pulls your attention a little more sometimes – you get to release this thing you’ve been holding for weeks, to really find the nucleus of the intensity.”
Calling from a friend’s place in western Massachusetts, Hagerup is self-deprecating and wildly expressive – her first espresso has just kicked in – and occasionally talks in circles around her latest album, System. To write, she says, she has to not necessarily know what she’s writing about: from opening song Easy, “I was sniffing a flower but I snorted a bug” is the kind of emotional trap door she sketches so well. Looking back on what the album might mean now, she sees “moments of struggle” as well as bird’s-eye views of the challenges of living in intentionally oppressive systems.
“In the moment, I didn’t realise I was depressed – it’s like watching your hair grow, you don’t realise you’ve gotten to a place that isn’t how you like to feel,” she says. “I would have a lot of shame about feeling so depressed when there’s so much beauty in the world. But then that’s just another way to judge yourself when you’re already low.”
The making of System sounded pretty painful: Hagerup staying up all night, forcing herself to write until some scrap of muse appeared to her. Looking back, she thinks it’s a result of the “immense pressure” people put themselves under in their mid-20s as they figure life out. “Hopefully as I’m getting older and more comfortable, I can approach music from less of a desperate … ” she mimes wrenching something out of the ground. “A lot of fear got wrapped up in it, but now it feels back to how it used to, like music is for the joy of the moment.”
Hagerup came of age musically in the famed western Massachusetts scene, where she stuck around after college far longer than she had planned. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore used to live there; J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr was a regular sight on the bike paths near where Hagerup lived.
“He wears his helmet!” she says. “I love this area so much. It’s beautiful but it doesn’t have enough going on to be distracting. I hadn’t been in a DIY scene before I moved here. I was like, what, we just get together and make this happen on our own?! Seeing all the work that went into the community was so beautiful. It totally changed the course of my life, and it gave me a lot of courage to do music on a more serious level.” Nevertheless, she moved to Los Angeles in the summer: “I was like, what if I went somewhere that I could never imagine myself?”
Since releasing her debut, Through the Window, in 2023, Hagerup has become used to her growing fandom seeming shocked by the darkness of her music. “I think the most powerful music is the most honest music,” she shrugs. “If it’s getting a little dark in here: well, chase that.” But as much as she sings about giving in, System is full of reminders not to fear “the sound of your broken, beating, dripping, heaving heart”, as she sings on Don’t Be Scared.
“That’s another thing I really value about music,” she says. “If you’re not going deep into the dark side, I don’t know how you can go deep into the light side.”
