...finding Marika Hackman on Google Music (as it was then) on my phone and apathetically browsing through the new releases thinking: 'I wonder what the kids today are listening to at the moment...' I'm not even that old, but that's the way it had gotten! I saw the cover of Any Human Friend, her latest release at the time (so Summer, 2019), and that album cover grabbed my attention immediately. There was something uncanny about it. Then later I realised that it had been inspired by a photographer called Rineke Dijkstra whose work has always fascinated me. Subconsciously, I must have sensed that this would be something cerebrally worthwhile listening to, something off the beaten track perhaps. It took me a year before I was hooked. A month or so of liking and then loving one song, 'Come Undone'; then more months of walking and digesting and finding that Marika was speaking to me in a way that no female artist had done for some time (and certainly not quite in the same way!) Any Human Friend is an album, for me, about coming to terms with yourself and allowing yourself to accept taboos about the human condition, specifically those attached to being a woman.