Marika Hackman Releases Passionate Ode to Sapphic Sex, “all night”

Sub Pop singer-songwriter Marika Hackman has never hid her sexuality. She writes bawdy songs about stealing girls from straight men (“Boyfriend”) or self-insert fan-fic for characters on the L-Word (“My Lover Cindy”) for her cult fanbase of queer women. She has swaggering, long-haired butch energy (an actual lyric: “I’ve got BDE”), like if Melissa Etheridge was a lothario.

In the third and latest single from her forthcoming album Any Human Friend, “all night,” Hackman drops her usual snarky tone for an explicit (in all senses of the term) ode to sapphic sex. It follows singles “the one” and “i’m not where you are,” and favors blissful indie-rock atmospherics over the downright poppy hearts of the first two. “We didn’t even speak you just took my hand and held it between your things,” sings Hackman in the first verse, wasting no time, over wistful grunge ballad instrumentation. On the chorus they “go down on one another” and Hackman comes to an erotic epiphany: “My mouth is just for moaning, kissing, fucking / all night.”

“I thought it would be exciting to write a really overtly sexual song about a woman from the perspective of a woman,” Hackman says of the song in a statement. “You don’t hear much about sex between women in music, or if you do its usually from a fetishized male perspective. I thought I’d reclaim a bit of that power.”

Any Human Friend is out Aug. 9 on Sub Pop. Listen to “all night” and revisit Hackman’s 2014 Daytrotter Session below.