Freya Magee’s Forget Yourself Not: Holding Onto Words That Fade
In the quiet of the night in between midnight admissions and morning joe, Freya Magee found her muse. On her second single, Forget Yourself Not, the London indie-pop vocalist writes a song for everyone who knows too well the fuzzy edges between truth and fallout. While her debut, Duplicity, was in the space of contemplation, this second one reaches out to chart the thin threads that unravel when words lose themselves in the booze that gave them life. It's a song for promises exchanged by neons and lost in sunlight in the next second.
Where others idealize the night, Magee cuts it up into something watchful and restless. Forget Yourself Not brings the same level of affection and ire to friendships and situationships, mapping the whiplash of trying to impose meaning on a wave that won't slow. She croons about the agony of watching people attempt to pour out truths they have forgotten, of a mirror reflecting the vulnerability of human intimacy when shattered by alcohol, desire, and amnesia. It’s a song that sighs, shakes its head, and yet still remembers.
Magee's trajectory here was initially mapped out in the isolation of Melbourne's 2020 lockdown, with guitar strings and notebooks as map and journal. And now, in London, she has producer Phil Taylor to collaborate with, and she has sharpened her cutting edge on her writing. Forget Yourself Not is a natural sequel to her debut — not a repeat, but an extension. These are songs of starting over, of gingerly penning new lines in an always awake city, and of affirming how frequently the words spoken in the darkness don't make it to morning.
The tune itself is aboil with desparation: tight guitars, retro synths, and drums that derail into weird places, like the ideas won't leave them alone. Magee's singing shudders on the same tension — brooding one moment, then exploding into crescendos that are wired with rage. Lyric kinks like "your stirring words all tumble out onto the tablecloth" bodily the vanishing moments, memory stampeded into song. And when she decelerates the line "watching the reruns decay," drawn out across a slowed tape effect, it's as if she's forcing us to hear meaning lose its way before us. Forget Yourself Not is out now — a track which may document the forgetting of others, but one which cannot be forgotten itself.
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