Hand Habits - Sugar The Bruise Hand Habits

“I’m aching to see you again / mistaken, beginning inside of the end,” Meg Duffy sings at the start of “Something Wrong,” the first song on their six-track new release, Sugar the Bruise. Everything that forms will un-form. Everything that comes together will disperse. Everything that lives will die. Every moment is over as it passes. Every end contains a beginning. Sugar the Bruise, out from Fat Possum Records on June 16, doesn’t shy away from these truths. It dives into the heart of them.

In August 2021, nearly 2 years before Sugar the Bruise’s creation, Duffy taught a month-long songwriting class through School of Song. They created a container for both new and experienced songwriters, designing prompts to help participants play with new approaches and forms. They re-discovered, with newfound clarity, the generative capacity of embracing the unknown, and how essential collaboration and improvisation are for accessing the indescribable.

After three beloved, meticulously written albums – 2017’s Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void), 2019’s Placeholder, and 2021’s Fun House – Duffy offered themself up for a 10-day writing trip. Working alongside Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic, Art Feynman) and in the final hours Philip Weinrobe (Adrienne Lenker, Cass McCombs, Lonnie Holly), at Panoramic Studios in Stinson Beach, CA, Duffy surrendered to the present moment, trusting that whatever sounds and words emerged were meant to emerge. With additional production, engineering and arranging from Jeremy Harris, Duffy created something which, in their words, “Turned out nothing like I’d imagined it would.”

The result of this collective experiment, born equally from play and intention, is a radical gift for listeners: proof that our most vital processes, creation and destruction, are exquisitely entangled. The unanswerable and untenable suffering of experience is the fact of perpetual loss. And, yet, there is precious, vivid magic created by this condition. In Sugar the Bruise, grief folds in on itself and becomes laughter; language fades away into sonic expanses of the inexpressible; melodies melt into cacophonies; love songs surrender to loss; historic violence is supplanted by the disks of sunlight.