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‘Kissed by a witch, I got hexed!” Aya howls through a storm of screaming electronics and bass groans on I Am the Pipe I Hit Myself With. The song revisits a time before Aya Sinclair was one of the UK avant garde’s most exciting talents – when she was still a Huddersfield teenager, newly into Christian rock. The music gave her “this tingly, bubbly sensation”, she says. “And someone said: ‘This is the holy spirit.’” The experience led her to join a Pentecostal congregation for a couple of years, but after confiding in a church friend about some “feelings” – Sinclair would later come out as a trans woman – she was “kicked out for being queer, essentially. I was given an ultimatum, to either closet myself or leave.” As she whispers in this track, over the quickening click of a Geiger counter, “they had me out on a witch-hunt, when I found myself”.
It’s a suitably vulnerable, conflicted opener to her new album Hexed!, which plays out in a lurching mix of heavy metal and hardcore electronics. The record sounds twisted and contorted, wincing at the pain of “peeling back the plaster”, she says over a video call. She is warm, funny and seemingly at peace – following the traumas and battles with substance abuse that she revisits on this nightmarish, alien album.
In her youth, Sinclair, now 31, used to love going for night walks. But seeing the suburban Huddersfield homes where she had once imagined starting a heteronormative family life gave her a “knotty feeling”. She now recognises that feeling as “latent queerness that wasn’t presenting itself yet – the knowledge that it wasn’t a life I could ever have”. Having come out as trans in 2018, she is in an ongoing process of understanding her gender identity. “My body is constantly changing, which is on the one hand very exciting,” she says, “but at the same time is also confusing.” She also notes that, as a woman, “I can’t walk on my own at night any more.”
As a musician, Aya speaks of being able to “contact this sublime, other essence” by drawing “excitement from sound”. But she also admits that “chasing that high through rave music has led me to some pretty dark relationships with substances”. After struggles with ketamine, cocaine and alcohol abuse, she is, on the day of our interview, six months clean.
Aya moved to Manchester in 2016, not long after the opening of The White Hotel, a former car repair workshop turned club in Salford and the locus for a new wave of local experimentalists. These included Iceboy Violet, with whom she formed the collective boygirl under her previous moniker Loft, and Tom Boogizm who she says “can DJ for 10 hours, but then make the most heartbreaking ambient record [as Rat Heart] you’ve ever heard – that dual energy represents Manchester to me.”
A visit to 2019’s Bang Face festival at Pontins holiday park in Southport, Merseyside, influenced her acclaimed 2021 debut album Im Hole. “You go into places where there’s usually someone doing balloon animals to families,” she says, “but instead, everyone’s off their face on dingers, and you’re watching the most blown-out, 200bpm hardcore you’ve ever heard.”
But her time in the north was also difficult. The body horror of Hexed! track Heat Death, picturing inflating cerebellums and broken teeth, was inspired by a period of “really intense, dissociative panic attacks. Losing two hours, coming around and thinking: ‘OK, well I guess I got off the train – I’m covered in snot and tears, and have no idea how I got here, but at least I’m in Manchester.’” While she still has these experiences, “they’re way less frequent and more manageable now that I’m sober”.
She illustrates the chaos of the period pre-sobriety through scattershot lyrics. The album’s stories blur time periods and locations, and the boundaries between narration and dialogue, reality and nightmare. “I’m slipping down the slope again / You’re gripping for the soap / I’m gipping on the coke,” she yells on Off to the Esso, a viscerally distressing picture of drug-fuelled nights out. She says she used substances as a way to provide “a level of distance from myself”, and manage her sensitivity to the world around her. “Unfortunately, that stops you fully engaging with the world as well.”
Sinclair relocated to London in 2020 to move in with her partner, but the north still looms large on her new record, down to the regional slang in Off to the Esso: “I’m sizzled, sozzled, hen.” She found a way to “tell the past through the present” by marrying the rock of her Huddersfield teenage years with the hardcore dance music she discovered later. And the album ends on northern moorland, where Aya seems to lift the album’s titular hex. Bidding farewell to “received wisdom, to double glaze in the middle distance”, her pained screams become digitised, angelic refrains. On our video call, she grins as she pictures the scene. “We’ve run away from the three-bedroom house, and we’re on top of the moors. We’re screaming at the sky, and the sky is screaming back at us.”
