Ora Cogan makes songs the way diviners cast charms. Her music moves on instinct but carries the deliberation of ritual, each gesture placed where feeling cuts closest to the bone. On Hardhearted Woman, her ninth album and debut for Sacred Bones, she casts an invocation for anyone determined to remain wild in a world where it’s easier to calcify.
Drawing from gothic Americana, psychedelic folk, and ghostly bluegrass, Hardhearted Woman sounds sourced from elsewhere, as if transmitting the lingering images of dreams. Elements of Cogan’s music, especially her voice, recall the oneiric haze of Grouper, but she fills the negative space with mazy instrumentation. Here, that includes a full ensemble of organs, fiddles, Wurlitzers, Nashville guitar, mandolins, 12-string acoustics, and pedal steel. Cogan skillfully gathers the players, including many from her noise and folk circles in Victoria, British Columbia, shaping arrangements like a lighting technician, scaling gradations of shadow and light.
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Cogan grew up on a small island in the Salish Sea, but left home at 15 to study silversmithing. The craft demands patience and the careful joining of stubborn parts—qualities that translate directly into her music, in which she drifts easily between country forms and dreamlike experimental passages. Each musical thread carries its own lineage, yet Cogan binds them through mood and intuition, shaping an atmosphere where tradition and experimentation meet without friction.
On “Outgrowing,” she pairs a light-footed jazz sway with dream-pop melodies and folksy vocals reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan. “Bury Me” marries menacing, dirge-like alt-country with propulsive neo-psychedelia. Organs and pedal steel drift through the mix alongside mandolins and 12-string acoustics. No single instrument dominates, nor do they act as strict counterpoints to one another. Sounds from opposite ends of the spectrum—felted resonances and sharp twangs—move in the same direction, drifting in parallel.
While she rides these contrasts, Cogan sings with a smoky steadiness. The tone is both tender and resolved as she faces a world steeped in cruelty. She wrote the opener, “Honey,” in response to anti-trans legislation, and she approaches the protest song by favoring the oblique over the polemic, mining everyday cruelty for unexpected depth and feeling. Slow, blooming chords dissolve into reverb as she sings, “Gunmetal smile/Guarding your heart/Guarding your style,” a line that draws its force by finding poetry from exclusion and social frost. It isn’t po-faced or on-the-nose. But even when she leans into that territory, as on “Division” (“Please don’t listen/Don’t give into the division”), it’s a sin that can be forgiven simply because the song is so beautiful. It lifts and punches through into something heavenly, Cogan’s voice at its most sensually energized, synths stargazing.
Cogan’s melodies often hang in abeyance and rarely fully resolve. She voices her chords loosely, allowing them to carry an unhurried uncertainty. She understands that no stance is truer to reality than ambivalence: holding opposites at once, meeting cruelty with kindness and callousness with softness. These are narcotic ballads drawn deep from Americana soil, where wildness remains the highest point of knowledge.
