By Frank Bell
Etaoin captures your attention with her raw songwriting talent – music that’s reminiscent of Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne, and Tracy Chapman. Her second EP ‘I Hate Everyone (but I don’t mind you)’, is focused on the theme of love and relationships. The artist shares her thoughts about feeling unsettled in her own life but never quite meaning to hurt anyone around her.
The new EP, out now via MADE Records, is her most ambitious project yet. She tackles the pain and heartbreak of past relationships and discovers inner strength with 4 tracks that prove to be some of her best work.
The EP ‘I Hate Everyone (but I don’t mind you)’ from Irish singer-songwriter Etain is a collection of songs with a mix of personal and passionate lyrics, pop melodies, and acoustic backings. Some songs are introspective, with vocals possessing an immense sense of melody.
‘Cold blood’ features a flexuous production which symbolizes the album’s more aggressive intent. The song, ‘If I Ever Find Home’, was co-produced by Brad Ellis and can be heard first on the EP. Etaoin’s voice is so vulnerable and intimate in this song, she looks like she’s truly found herself.
Etaoin explains: “I wrote ‘If I Ever Find Home’ about my first heartbreak. The song is about feeling totally alone and lost. I wrote it at a time when I felt like I had been searching in the dark for months just trying to find my old self again after things ended with the first boy I ever loved. We had been best friends for years, he had told me he had feelings for me but ultimately chose another girl over me. I lost my best friend and the person I cared about so much all in one. School was a total nightmare, I’d see them around making out in the hallway and literally wanted to curl up and disappear. – she adds – The thing that I think everyone finds hardest about their first heartbreak, is that since you’ve never felt pain like that before you don’t know if it’s gonna get better. So you end up searching for them in the faces of strangers on the underground, calling them drunk, keeping your friends up on the phone obsessing over everything that went wrong, deleting their number in anger and then regretting it because you miss them way more than you could ever hate them. It completely breaks you down and then builds you back up into a new, more guarded person.”
She concludes: “The EP ‘I Hate Everyone (but I don’t mind you)’ covers messy breakups, dramatic teenage situationship dramas, friend fallouts, and awkward sexual tension. It retains all the themes of my first EP in being brutally honest and vulnerable about heartbreak, whilst also adding in themes of hope, and excitement. It’s the best body of work I’ve ever released and I’m so unbelievably proud of it.”
Etaoin is playing these new songs at live shows in London and Manchester this October.
ETAOIN TOUR DATES:
19 October – Manchester – 33 Oldham Street
20 October – London – Camden Assembly
