![]() ![]() On the pensive album opener “Tender Heart,” Bowe unpacks the soft touch of her love over a stripped arrangement of padded synths and a chirping guitar line. The shades of longing and isolation found throughout “Haters” succumb to a more powerful tone of vulnerability. The homespun, DIY videos for “Party” and “Domino” showcase a band unworried by outside influence. The immediacy in which they finished the song set a tone for the rest of the album which Bowe says was “really focused on the fun parts” of making music. “I made the track for Justine to sing on,” Lee recalls, adding that “Knife” was the song to rekindle their creative partnership just as the pandemic began. It’s brimming with that sort of youthful dreaminess experienced on a wistful late night drive. “You be the knife/ Cut through the noise of my mind/ And we’ll be alright,” Bowe sings on “Knife,” a driving, heartland tune pulling from the hazy indie rock of both The War on Drugs and Angel Olsen. The reaching indie pop songs on “Haters,” though sometimes longing and lonely, feel like two people purified by the love of making music for each other. While it comes with an air of ennui, it also provides a fresh start, a feeling of freedom to act and create without convention. Bowe - who lives in Somerville and works in communications at a university - and Lee - who works at a strategy and design studio in Brooklyn - have transitioned from the musical whirlwind of their 20s to a grounded 30s. “Was the dream ever a good dream in the first place?” Bowe adds. “ speak to this idea that you’re in your thirties, go to your day job, play music, go back to your day job, leave early and go to sound check… You’re always like, ‘Am I chasing that dream, or is that dream gone?’” “ was one of the more immediate songs we wrote together,” Lee says. ![]() “I wanna believe it without wondering why,” she sings on the album’s synthy title track, her breathy vocals investigating the complex juncture of art and occupation. “We’ve got a vocabulary, musical or otherwise, that really allows us to use a shorthand to make everything happen.” “We have that past and that is the foundation that the band is built on,” Bowe says. Through their shared history as musical companions, “ Haters” - the duo’s debut album (out June 9) - finds Bowe and Lee as both seasoned and cynical allies of the resistance, two cohorts making music for each other while relishing in the outer edges of the industry. Once bandmates 13 years ago in the major label indie-pop group Magic Man, the pair began dating during their tenure in the band, then broke up as Magic Man disassembled in 2015 and finally found their way as best friends and collaborators years after, first with Bowe’s solo project Photocomfort and now as hex gf. “Well, I am Sam’s hex-girlfriend,” she adds casually. But it seemed appropriate for this project. “hex gf was one of those ideas,” she says. “They’re million-dollar ideas, mostly,” he says, as Bowe mentions a Halloween costume idea: Leonardo Decapitated. Lee, also present for the interview, acknowledges the list. “Party concepts, companies.” She confirms this by pulling up a list of names on her phone, revealing the origins of hex gf (pronounced hex-girlfriend), the musical project she shares with multi-instrumentalist producer Sam Vanderhoop Lee. “I have a lot of names for a lot of schemes,” Justine Bowe says. Facebook Email Sam Vanderhoop Lee and Justine Bow of hex gf. ![]()
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