Marika Hackman has shared her first single in four years, ‘No Caffeine’.
The uplifting track is her first new material since her 2019 album ‘Any Human Friend’.
“’No Caffeine’ is a list of what to do to avoid having a panic attack and looking at my anxiety as an abusive partner,” said Hackman of the new song.
“Occupy your mind / Don’t stay home / Talk to all your friends, but don’t look at your phone / Scream into a bag / Try to turn your brain off,” she sings on the track.
The singer-songwriter has also shared a video for the song, which sees her getting a bloody nose before she is physically sick. You can view it below.
Despite it being her first new material in four years, Hackman did release a covers album during the pandemic in 2020, featuring songs by Grimes, Sharon Van Etten, The Shins and Beyoncé.
“I wanted to spend the majority of lockdown writing my fourth album, but I found it very hard to be creative in that way: to start with a blank page and make something out of nothing,” Hackman told NME at the time about the motivation behind ‘Covers’. “A lot of musicians and creatives I’ve spoken to have found it to be a really uninspiring time. The world has sort of paused and there isn’t anything around that you can cling on to, to find exciting, to fuel some artistic drive.
“So I still wanted to be creative and productive because I find sitting around twiddling my thumbs to be really bad for my brain,” she added. “‘Covers’ just felt like a very easy, natural thing to choose to do that was borne out of creative frustration.”
Reviewing the record, NME awarded it four stars and said: “Created in lockdown, ’Covers’ offered Hackman a way to stay creative without pressuring herself to find the inspiration to write a record from scratch in this stifling time. Intimate and inventive, it’s a beautiful exercise – and one that could provide a bridge between last year’s ‘Any Human Friend’ and the musician’s planned return to melancholic material on her next original work.”
