Label: Mostly At Night
Released: July 2021
This month saw the release of new music from South East London’s non-binary artist, Harve.
‘Other Side of the Room’ opens by emulating a return to consciousness through warps and swells that begin an evolution into soft synth, rubber bass tones and atonal delay oscillations that glide in and around pure harmonies.
“I know there’s things you won’t tell nobody and I tried too hard to be your somebody”
The song is described by the artist as “...a song I wrote entirely for myself; about finding home within, listening to my own needs. But it was also my final attempt to let my then partner know how I was feeling. ‘Other Side Of The Room’ is about checking in with yourself, it's about knowing when to let go, it's about stopping yourself from being left behind, and finding yourself in your loneliness.”
What drives my addiction to this track is the way it forces me to be at my most transparent without hysteria. The soft embrace of the Experimental/R&B production combined with Harve’s fluent translation of feelings into song is incredibly interesting to me - particularly in relation to the unmapped experience of queer relationships.
As an adolescent I learnt how to love from the love songs of my time - not realising that they actually weren’t written for me. Yet I still continued to allow their narratives to dictate the standards for my relationships. In truth, understanding any form of relationship is steeped in mystery, though seemingly none more than the queer. Sadly, there is no rule book and certainly no debrief for the current popularisation and fetishisation of queer existence which in it’s popularised wake now dictates our stereotypes.
Those writing lovesongs for a queer audience have to examine relationships within an ever expanding spectrum which essentially constitutes everything except straight, and yet two universal truths of most love centric relationships remain, infatuation and sorrow. It is at this intersection of emotion and personal experience that Harve triumphs. Their vulnerable lyricism and songwriting has provided genuine empathy and comfort regarding the uniqueness of queer relationships whilst still empathising with the ideals of true love.
Perplexingly perfect, I cannot wait to hear more.