Doo-wop vocals and buzzing disco backbeats are dashed with sparkling drums and electric riffs on the new SICK GIRL EP from local singer-songwriter -EVA-.
-EVA-, aka Eva Leach, has focused heavily on developing original solo material for the past two years. The 22-year-old’s first full-length record, Imperfect Parallels, came to light last fall under the artist moniker she shares with her brother, Nathan & Eva. The duo’s jazzy Americana is a far cry from her newest three-song project.
SICK GIRL’s carefree pop builds with Leach’s layered vocal harmonies and dissipates into percussive girl-rock aggression. Her raw voice sings about ugly stuff with basal tones over pretty instrumentation to articulate a jarring narrative.
“When you talk about assault, abuse, miscarriages — I never hear people blatantly say the words,” Leach told City Paper. “It’s always very delicate, like the emotion behind it or metaphors. I blatantly called some things out for what they were.”
At the start of the COVID pandemic, Leach began having chronic partial seizures out of nowhere, all the while experiencing a series of traumatic relationship events.
“I got to the point where I mentally broke,” Leach recalled. “I said: ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks. I’ve been listening to everybody except for myself.’ So I put everything that I thought into my music. People who have chronic health conditions are invisible. SICK GIRL is my voice for when I did not have one.”
Spattered across her songs are no-holds-barred lyrics: “when you got me pregnant,” “I was so ill they put me on pills” and “I was suicidal.”
Leach was propelled forward by her penchant for female bedroom pop from the likes of up-and-comers Remi Wolf and Maude Latour. Her love for their DIY production shows itself in the homemade drum and bass beats that she layered with recordings of her brother Nathan’s guitar-playing.
The punch that SICK GIRL packs into nine minutes is a huge stepping stone for Leach because she also did all the artwork, production and promotion. The EP’s promotional art juxtaposes the color pink’s essence of girliness with heavy grungy makeup and freeze frames of psychotic-break moments to symbolize the loss of innocence. In Leach’s perspective, being victimized by physical and emotional violence inherently causes you to doubt yourself first and foremost.
“When I was going through all that trauma, the music that saved me was female pop music — bad bitch energy. Instead of listening to sad music … I changed the narrative,” she said. “And it’s that kind of energy that I wanted to give back. It’s been really empowering for me to know that I did it and that it’s there, that people are responding. It sounds weird but I inspired myself.”
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