Being a people pleaser is never easy. “It’s self-sabotage,” says Grace Inspace Garner. “The more you make nice and try to keep other people happy, the more you lose yourself and your grasp on your own desires and opinions.”
Born in Los Angeles and raised in London, Garner is the product of artistic parents and an itinerant family life. She carried the untethered lifestyle into adulthood, conceiving her 2023 debut, Sunshine Kid, in an Airstream amid Northen California’s ancient, towering redwoods. But where that EP traded characters and genres with fanciful abandon, the new Heavy Hair gets serious about the neuroses behind a rootless existence. With help from close friends Luna Li, Josh Mehling (Shelly) and Tennessee-based twin brothers Parker and Marshall Mulherin, Garner crafts a soulful and cushiony classic-pop landing pad for her heavy themes.
“The chorus of ‘Emergency Contact’ is the concept the whole EP hinges on: storing unattractive emotions like anger in my ‘heavy hair’ and going through life pretending I’m serene and satisfied,” says Garner, adding that both the music and the video came together in a single night. “I wrote the song with Parker in his living room, completely unplanned. We recorded everything on voice notes with our phones. I filmed the video with my mum, (acclaimed photographer) Kate Garner, during a rainstorm one night. We just ran out with a low-res camera and a flashlight and filmed the whole thing. I edited it together with a lot of my drawings, and it just fit the mood of the song perfectly. This was something I’ve been trying to say for a while—and it poured out of me.”
We’re proud to premiere Grace Inspace’s “Emergency Contact.” Heavy Hair is set for release February 27 via Todo.
—Hobart Rowland
