aya – hexed! Review

Release Date: April 5, 2025

Label: Hyperdub

hexed! Album — aya’s *hexed!* is a brutal, beautiful descent into club chaos and cathartic self-destruction—where vulnerability screams through distortion.

Some albums cast a spell. hexed!, the second full-length from Manchester-based experimental artist aya, doesn’t ask for permission—it grabs you by the throat, snarls in your ear, and laughs as you lose your sense of time. It’s a beautifully deranged trip into the sonic psyche of an artist who’s as unfiltered as she is fearless. If her 2021 debut im hole cracked the door open, hexed! tears it off its hinges and throws it into a fire of queer industrial chaos.

From the first blast of “I am the pipe I hit myself with,” it’s clear this isn’t just music—it’s confrontation. “off to the ESSO” thrashes like a club track possessed, while “the names of Faggot Chav boys” buries vulnerability under layers of distortion and brittle rage. “navel gazer” offers one of the few breathers, still drenched in shadow, while “Time at the Bar” closes the record like a haunted monologue after last call—exhausted, raw, human.

There’s a violent kind of beauty in aya’s sound design—tracks are jagged, brutal, and often difficult, but intentionally so. Nothing on hexed! plays nice. It’s riddled with harsh textures, fragmented rhythm, and spoken-word confessionals that feel ripped from inner monologue or nightmare. Yet, between the glitch-drenched hysteria and drum-punctured silence, aya builds something alive and, somehow, tender.

Much of hexed! is born from aya’s reckoning with early sobriety, sexuality, and a Pentecostal upbringing she’s long since left behind. It’s part autobiography, part exorcism. The project lives at the crossroads of club culture and personal reckoning—grief, gender, identity, and recovery all swirl through the noise. If it sounds like it’s coming apart at the seams, that’s the point.

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.5/5)hexed! isn’t a record for everyone—but for those willing to walk through fire, there’s something deeply cathartic waiting on the other side. aya has delivered one of the year’s most fearless, fractured, and fascinating albums.