London’s Eaves Wilder announces her debut EP, Hookey, out March 24th on Secretly Canadian, and presents the third single from the EP, “Are You Diagnosed?” Hookey details Eaves Wilder’s story so far. Hidden behind dreamy shoegaze guitars and delivered in Wilder’s sweet voice, her lyrics are honest, direct, and deceptively cutting. New single, “Are You Diagnosed?,” delves into Eaves’ experience with the British mental health service, CAMHS. Atop heavy distorted guitars and a playful chorus, Wilder sings of feeling a need to play the system in order to get the help she needed. Eventually making herself recover, “Are You Diagnosed?” is a tongue-in-cheek dig and a deliberate de-romanticisation of mental illness. 
 
“I first entered the Child and Adolescent Mental Health services — or CAMHS — when I was eleven.” explains Eaves.  “Although they did finally help me, and I left at the age of fifteen, ‘Are You Diagnosed?’ is basically a stream-of-consciousness, scream for help rant/report about what it’s like in those awful, quiet waiting rooms, and consulting rooms.”
 
“As CAHMS is so dangerously underfunded by the government, the deal is— the closer you are to death, the higher up the waiting list you go. Which on average is around 16 months. And people with eating disorders are competitive anyway, so it’s very easy to look around the waiting room, and think, ‘I need to be the most ill person here. I need to get … ill-er than the girl with the bandages on her arms, or the tube up her nose – or I’ll never get treated. I’m going to make my way up that list.
 
“The key thing is getting your diagnosis. There’s no treatment until diagnosis. You don’t know what is happening to you. And a lot of people doubt you are ill anyway. They (friends, family, teachers) think that you’re making it all up, I think that’s easier for them. And so the biggest question is, over and over: ‘Are you diagnosed? Are you diagnosed?’”
 
Now fully recovered, Wilder confesses anger towards her former self and her previous desire to take up less space. She wants to write songs for girls like the early-teenage Eaves: “I write songs imagining the person who’s listening to them, which is always a quite sad, lonely 14 year old girl. I want her, whoever she is, to listen and be like, that is exactly what I’m going through and this person understands, and I’m not alone.”

With Hookey, Eaves has swapped her bedroom for the studio, spending 2022 co-producing with Andy Savours (Arctic Monkeys; Black Country, New Road; Rina Sawayama).
 
“Hookey is basically about bunking off,” Eaves says. “I spent most of my teens playing hookey in the music room at school. That’s where I wrote songs and taught myself instruments. ‘Are You Diagnosed?’ was written in the middle of my French  class, and I remember mixing my first demos of ‘Morning Rain’ under my desk. Through lyrics, production, or melody, my main thing is always adding as many hooks as possible — or how can I expect people to listen?”
 
“My inner dialogue when writing or jamming is ‘MAKE IT MORE HOOKEY!!!!!’ Each song is kind of a different perspective of where I was and why I wasn’t at school, it shows a progression. It started in the hospital when I was unable to speak my mind, and ended with the decision to share the secret songs I’d been making.”

Photo Courtesy: Holly Whitaker