Today, on 30th September 2022, dodie released her new EP, Hot Mess. It comes after the success of her debut album Build A Problem, which culminated in a triumphant UK and US tour and was described by The Guardian as ‘quietly devastating’. As well as this, listeners may know her work after hearing single ‘Ready Now’, as featured in hit animated show Moominvalley.
If you’ve listened to dodie’s work before, this EP will sound familiar. If you haven’t, it will feel familiar. No matter the themes explored in her music, the gentle acoustics—particularly in titular song ‘Hot Mess’ and ‘Lonely Bones’—are entirely signature and never seem to grow tiring.
‘Lonely Bones’, with its slightly faster pace and fitting, light tinkles of the piano, is perhaps the strongest track. It is cheerful yet wistful—it sounds and feels like solitude; like a stroll through the park on a summer day; like a waltzing melody at the fairground. There is something Mary Poppins-esque about it. The strings are a constant accompaniment throughout, providing something deeper and more mellow for the piano to play off of.
The EP suits its name—although it only contains four tracks there’s a sense of deliberate chaos to it. ‘Got Weird’, for example, does not entirely sound in sync with the other tracks in pace or instrumentals. This may be because it sounds a little more artificial than the rest of the tracks. Acoustics have less presence here, and the song is less gentle-sounding, infused with the sense of false-confidence conveyed within the lyrics (“I played the man and you bought it, talk over glass like I own it.”) There is a sense, though, that this discordance is intended, as everything in this album is. The theme of messiness is a reminder, in a way, that despite dodie’s musical success, they are human just like the rest of us. That’s an oddly comforting way to end the summer.
Words by Casey Langton
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