Hand Habits, the project of Los Angeles-based musician Meg Duffy (they/them), has shared a
new single titled “Graves,” the latest from their anticipated upcoming album, Fun House,
available for pre-order now and due 10/22 via Saddle Creek.

Of the track, Duffy says: “This song is a secret message to myself, a reminder, a conversation
with grief and remembrance. A questioning of my own memory and it’s proximity to
understanding closure.”

While Fun House shares some of the same hallmarks as previous Hand Habits releases —a
kind of outré queer sensibility, a gentle sense of vulnerability — the record is a marked sonic
departure from the often muted tones of 2019’s Placeholder and 2017’s Wildly Idle (Humble
Before the Void). Instead, the tracks on Fun House sparkle, moving in unexpected directions
and eschewing any specific genre, packaging narratives about loss, romantic longing, and
childhood trauma inside polished synth pop next to tracks with a ragged, Neil Young quality. The
push/pull of styles, paired with songs that move deftly between the present and past, give the
record a wildly diverse, hall of mirrors quality that befits its name. Where previous Hand Habits
records could be fairly insular affairs, both in their creation and their execution, Fun House feels
ebullient, lush, a fully-realized conversation. It is Duffy’s most ambitious Hand Habits album to
date.

Produced by Sasami Ashworth (SASAMI) and engineered by Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), the
record was not intended as a reaction to the pandemic, but it was very much the result of taking
a difficult, if much-needed, moment of pause. Emboldened by going into therapy and coaxed by
Ashworth to push the songs into unexpected new shapes, the resulting music is more acutely
personal and stylistically adventurous than anything you’ve heard from Hand Habits before.

Photo Courtesy: Jacob Boll