The self is a house with many windows, some curtained by habit, some thrown open by courage. Gender, like weather, moves through us. The masculine and the feminine are not rivals; they are siblings, sharing a bed of breath. When one is denied, the other grows brittle. To reclaim the inner child is to remember play before proof, wonder before verdict. It is to kneel, unashamed, and listen for the small voice that knows how to live without permission and keeps faith with softness and strength.
This is the quiet ache at the center of Hot Hail!’s WYRD, a reaching inward that feels like an overheard confession. Originally released as a single on last year’s All The Blood You Wanted, the track from the Seattle dark synth act carries the patience of something long considered before being spoken. It has a sense of familiarity that feels inherited rather than borrowed, lines folding into one another with careful grace, each phrase weighed, then released.
The song, channeling the synth stylings of Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and Fad Gadget, speaks in the voice of an absent companion: the feminine self pressed down early, disciplined out of sight, yet never destroyed. This address gives WYRD its emotional gravity. It sings to rather than about, opening a space where tenderness survives instruction. The music moves with steady resolve, synthetic tones breathing alongside the vocal, granting the words room to stand upright and unafraid.
“I want it to mean something for everyone across the gender spectrum,” says Billy Sigil. “I think it kind of transcends even the distinction between cis and trans…” These words land with the authority of lived knowledge, describing a childhood education built on subtraction, where softness is treated as error and loss becomes routine. The act of reaching for what was taken is etched into every measure.
Directed by Seattle filmmaker Skye Warden, the video gives this interior struggle a visible body. Faces fracture beneath an optical veil, half-present, half-obscured, a visual shorthand for a self divided before language could intervene. Purple-tinted light suggests queer joy, art, and community, set against the constriction of repression, not as spectacle but as lived contrast.
Sigil’s own reflection deepens this reckoning: “Oh fuck. I summoned her!” The recognition is startling, intimate, nearly devotional. The figure on screen sings back what was written, collapsing the distance between author and address, wound and witness.
The final gesture, an echo of Hedwig And The Angry Inch. lands with stark clarity. A wall, a sentence, a departure. The words remain because they are plain, brutal, and true: “The first woman they teach you to hate is the one inside you.”
Watch the video for “WYRD” below:
The wyrd woman waits—steady, weathered, and more enduring than the eye admits. You may have let her fall from memory, but she has kept watch all the same. Beneath soft synth breaths and a cut-edged beat, she draws close and sings not of escape, but of staying alive.
Listen to Wyrd below and order All The Blood You Wanted here.
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