If Izzy Hagerup’s new album, System, feels immediately uncompromising, it’s because it was never really designed for public consumption. Released under her Prewn moniker, Hagerup describes the album as a “private journal made public.” The arresting nine songs on System chronicle a deeply personal journey through the darkness of depression, but one that’s always undercut by moments of humor, as well as selfishness and self-reflection. It’s a push and pull that feels wholly distinctive.
Following Prewn’s 2023 debut album Through The Window, a collection of songs that Pitchfork hailed as a “striking example of Hagerup’s ability to sit with ugliness,” System finds her crawling even deeper into the dense folds of the night. Hagerup wrote and recorded the album alone, mostly in long stretches of bedroom sessions that found her working through the night until she began to hear birdsong. System reckons with many of the thoughts that tend to surface in those small hours: guilt, shame, and self-absorption, as well as the societal pressures that sit at the root of such things.
“This new album comes from a much more self-centered place, the stagnant aftermath of intensity and emotion,” Hagerup says. “I think it came from a period of time that was more numb, hollow, and confused. More disassociated from heartfelt pain, more entrenched in a frustrating and aimless discomfort.”
That discomfort manifests itself in various ways throughout System. Each of the songs was the result of random inspiration, with Hagerup working out of a desperation to record the pieces before the feeling slipped through her fingers. “I feel in a constant state of writer’s block, but I just put myself in the studio for hours and hours, sometimes in agony and desperation for any muse at all,” she explains. “Every once in a blue moon, a nugget gets thrown my way and I run as far as I can with it.”
The result is a wildly unique album that carries a sense of restlessness and unease in its bones, but also pulls the curtain back on what it takes and what it means to fully explore the self through song. “It seems that misery’s my best friend. I know it’ll come to me again and again…” Hagerup sings on the title track. Written while feeling acutely overwhelmed in a sea of people, the song touches on everything from the mechanisms of the music industry, to cycles of depression, to the seemingly never-ending battle to escape the clutches of patriarchy and capitalism. “When I wrote it I was supposed to be present and alive and gracious and happy, but somehow I couldn’t escape my own internal fears and depression that can follow me wherever I go,” she says.
Pulling together a number of System’s key sentiments, “Dirty Dog” plays like an intense fever dream, a song where the listener can never quite find their footing within the glitchy, malaise-like backdrop of its scorched instrumentation. “I think a large continuity of the songs lies in the amateur quality of them. I’m a sucker for an imperfect recording,” Hagerup says. That sentiment bristles throughout “Dirty Dog,” shaping it into something prickly and unilluminated in a way that feels almost radical.
It’s a dimension explored repeatedly on System, and present again on “Only You,” which is a lighter but no less labored undertaking. Where much of the album is shaped by the dense weave of atmosphere that ripples just below the surface, the song holds a torch to Hagerup’s voice and feels fascinating and oddly beautiful as it bends into shapes you can never quite piece together or look away from. “This song is about the experience of falling in love for the first time,” she says. “Being enamored with the feeling and the person, while also being skeptical of the experience. What’s you, what’s me? What’s projection? What’s love versus attachment? We never really get to the bottom of it in this one.”
From a bedroom floor in the middle of the night, through a tangle of cables and complex emotions, System grew into a document of disassociation. But it arrives undercut with a sense of lightness in comparison to Hagerup’s debut, and it doesn’t surrender to the darkness. Instead, System dives into it with a keen and exploring eye, and through the gloom finds constant realizations of the wonder and appreciation of life. It’s a journey that holds a special kind of power, a brave struggle that never asks listeners to look away but instead to follow down the rabbit hole. That it leads to a place of fascination is a testament to the force these songs hold: songs of hurt and heart, fear and fun.
