On her debut, full-length, solo album Going to Hell, the U.K.-based singer-songwriter Lande Hekt presents a stirring collection of musical self-contemplation that explores, among other themes, Hekt’s journey of coming out as queer.
Although Hekt’s longtime band Muncie Girls perform with a more punk-oriented vibe, Hekt founds the songs on Going to Hell upon gently poignant guitar melodies and her own singing, delivering an ultimately richly dynamic yet centrally focused collection of music.
“The songs have quite differing themes throughout, but the theme that I kind of wanted to push and highlight over the whole album is the queer issue because the whole album is kind of like a documentation of me coming out as gay,” Hekt shares. “So, there’s at least a few songs that either reference that or are completely about that, so that’s kind of the running theme, and the title Going to Hell is from that song ‘Going to Hell,’ which is all about coming out as gay. So, I think that’s the main thing, and I’m not sure—musically, I think that they’re all relatively different, although they were recorded in the same session.”
The title track, which appears towards the end of the record, confronts the animosity towards queer people within certain Catholic communities. Alongside broadly strummed acoustic guitar melodies, Hekt includes subtly heart-rending lines like: “Your friends from home start acting strange when you try to be yourself for a change,” and the earnest music itself seems to carry a similar ache.
The album’s overall gentle push forward seems to reflect a sense of longing dragged down by an emotional undertow, and the music feels like a reflection of powering through an internal wave of emotional strain as tumultuous feelings remain firmly in place, even if in the mental background.
“I didn’t write the album thinking that I was even going to record an album,” Hekt shares. “I just had enough songs that I then decided to record one, but I think it’s kind of always a similar process when I’m writing songs, where I kind of write songs unintentionally—not necessarily towards a project, just because it’s helpful for me to write down lyrics at the time and make a song about it because for some reason it just makes me feel a lot better, or it just helps me to make sense of some sort of thoughts that I’m having, and so I’m always writing kind of along the way.
“Writing this album was definitely, like, a helpful process for me and quite grounding, I guess, without sounding too much like using therapy buzzwords. It makes me feel a bit more peaceful, and I know myself slightly better once I’ve written some songs, and that’s definitely the case for this album.”
Hekt recorded Going to Hell at her friend Ben David’s studio in Australia in early 2020.
“I like the way they came out,” she shares of the songs. “It was quite an organic thing of just being in the studio and developing the songs on the spot.”
Hekt’s first solo effort was a 2019 EP called Gigantic Disappointment, which she released digitally and also recorded at David’s studio.
“A lot of it is kind of circumstantial in terms of the time that we’re in. My band weren’t getting together as much,” she shares of her solo work. “We all live in different cities, and so that wasn’t as much of an option, but at the same time, I think it’s more kind of to do with the fact that these songs are relatively introspective, and I’m writing about different subject matters than I was doing with my band.
“Muncie Girls is quite a political band, and we talk quite openly about politics and quite straightforwardly, so nobody can be kind of confused in any way, and I guess with my solo songs, they are slightly more—not like written in metaphors all the time, but they’re not as obvious and they’re more open to people’s interpretations, and I think that suits the solo songs a bit more—the fact that they’re sometimes a little bit more stripped back and kind of more exposed, I guess.”
Her latest album ranges from the straightforward acoustic opening of “Whiskey” to the subtle rhythmic swagger of “Hannover,” and onward to the rather full sound of “Undone,” which Hekt released as a single. Generally, the instrumentals move right along with the sentiments that Hekt is sharing via her lyrics, shaping a personal-feeling experience.
“It’s really rewarding to be able to play lots of instruments, and I’m a bit of a control freak, so I really enjoyed having full creative control on writing the musical parts, and not kind of giving up parts of the song to other people,” Hekt shares. “But then having said that, you kind of lose certain parts. There’s potential to take the songs in a different direction if you had the input of collaborators, but I personally really enjoyed it, and I think it’s quite interesting to see how far a song can go with only my ideas, and for me, it’s quite interesting and fun.”
Going to Hell closes with “In the Darkness,” a piece of subtly triumphant praise and encouragement for democracy. Originally, Hekt wrote the lyrics for a piece performed by a feminist choir in southwest England.
“I had almost like a specific brief for writing that song based on the experiences of women local to the area, but yeah, that song is like an anti-fascist song, and I quite enjoyed the sentiment of that, and I thought it would be useful to chuck that on the album, especially if anyone feels any affinity with it,” she shares.
The track definitely feels relevant.
“I definitely think that everything’s so bleak all the time, and pretty horrifying,” Hekt observes. “I think if we can feel some sort of hopefulness or at least any kind of spark of politics that we might feel that there might be positive action towards, then I think that’s really good.
I don’t often write positive songs—I’m normally writing quite miserable songs—but I was really happy to be able to put that song on the record because I do think it’s got a certain level of optimism, and, like, the idea of protecting democracy against fascism—which is what the song’s about—as well as partaking in our political system while also understanding that there are actually other ideals to be working towards beyond a kind of half-hearted democracy that we are trying to protect at the moment.”
Personally, Hekt has also lately been finding connection in the music of Bruce Springsteen and The Proclaimers.
“Weirdly enough —I normally listen to, like, indie rock and kind of like jangle pop from the ’80s or ’90s, or sort of like riot grrrl,” Hekt shares. “But at the moment, I’ve really only been listening to two artists, and that’s Bruce Springsteen and The Proclaimers—two, like, seriously patriotic figures, one from Scotland and one from America. I don’t know why—I think it’s because it’s been really strange times, and I just think that music you have to work towards liking before you can enjoy it is just too much at the moment, and I just want to listen to the classics.
“So yeah, I’ve been jamming Born in the U.S.A., the record, non-stop. It’s a fucking banger of an album. And then ‘Over and Done With’ by The Proclaimers I’ve been spinning a lot recently.”
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