Hand Habits, the project of Los Angeles-based musician Meg Duffy (they/them), announces a new collection of songs titled Sugar The Bruise, out June 16th via Fat Possum, and shares a lyric video for its lead single “Something Wrong.”

“For Sugar the Bruise, I had no plan other than to let my mind go blank, and lean into the playful side of things,” Duffy explains. “To laugh a little, to lighten up, to shift the focus off of my own experience a bit.”

Inspired by month-long songwriting class Duffy taught in the summer of 2021, they re-discovered, with newfound clarity, the generative capacity of embracing the unknown, and how essential collaboration and improvisation are for accessing the indescribable. 

Working with Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic, Art Feynman) and Philip Weinrobe (Adrienne Lenker, Cass McCombs), Duffy surrendered to the present moment, trusting that whatever sounds and words emerged were meant to emerge. With additional production, engineering and arranging from Jeremy Harris, Duffy created something which, in their words, “turned out nothing like I’d imagined it would.”

The result of this collective experiment, born equally from play and intention, is a radical gift for listeners: proof that our most vital processes, creation and destruction, are exquisitely entangled. The unanswerable and untenable suffering of experience is the fact of perpetual loss. And, yet, there is precious, vivid magic created by this condition. In Sugar the Bruise, grief folds in on itself and becomes laughter; language fades away into sonic expanses of the inexpressible; melodies melt into cacophonies; love songs surrender to loss; historic violence is supplanted by the disks of sunlight. 

Photo Courtesy: Ivanna Baranova