Hand Habits Soften the Ache

Meg Duffy’s everlasting imprint on the landscape of modern music creates its own unflinching, generous world. Across their work as Hand Habits, Yes/And and a bevy of session credits, they’ve taken many shapes and unspooled a number of different voices from the recesses of their own creative margins. While they are always an in-demand guitarist on other folks’ records, it’s as Hand Habits where Duffy finds freedom through personal reflection and sonic curiosity. Each album they make detours from what precedes it; every song arrives like a precise, steadfast and curious vision.

The way Duffy has evolved since their 2017 debut Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void) has been a crawl towards the badge of brightness they proudly sport today. For the last six years, they’ve perfected slow-burn, acoustic pastorals and synth-folk treasures. Songs like “Flower Glass,” “yr heart [reprise]” and “Gold/Rust” are courageous and miraculous monoliths from a sonic perspective; narratively, Duffy has migrated towards reflexive, bare-hearted and—sometimes—painful renderings of memories affixed to the dimensions of their own ongoing growth. On 2019’s placeholder and 2021’s Fun House—the latter especially—Duffy put a lot of effort into constructing palaces from the framework of personal grief and trauma: “Aquamarine” was about their mother’s suicide; “Clean Air” entangled their trans identity with imagery of a cherry tree their aunt planted for them years ago. Their storytelling had never been less opaque, splitting open old misery and processing a once-dormant catharsis.

So it should come as no surprise that Sugar the Bruise, the fourth Hand Habits album, is a crash-course on what the period of an, essentially, on-record ciphering of turmoil and metamorphosis might look like. It’s not an EP, and Duffy is quick to correct anyone who doesn’t respect their album’s pronouns. “Just as an experiment, I’ve been interested in thinking about it as a record, becuase it is a record of songs that exist and it is shorter, but it’s not that much shorter than other records that are called records,” they say. “And, it took the same amount of work.” At six songs tallying up a 20-minute runtime, each entry on Sugar the Bruise is distinct and separate; a tracklist that obliterates the luxury and ease of just swimming through the motions.

After making Fun House with SASAMI and Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), Duffy was unsure of where they would—or should—turn next. The events and eulogies and identities that have informed who they are were now out in the open, but—being the near-prolific creator and performer that they are (two albums, a multi-year tour playing in Perfume Genius’ band and guesting on over a handful of records made by their peers), a corner ached to be turned. Around the time Fun House hit streaming in the fall of 2021, Duffy began teaching a songwriting class at the School of Sound and that course quickly became a vessel for their own germinating experimentations—beyond the prompts they gave their students, which beckoned the cohort to turn a new eye towards any preconceptions of form and structure. “It really influenced the way that I thought about songwriting and composition and taking risks,” Duffy says. “I think, with Fun House, I was really pushing a lot of my own comfort zones in the music. And working with SASAMI really helped, and she very much, in a loving way, pushed me past what I was comfortable doing.”

Initially afraid to step into the openness we hear on the final cut of Fun House, Duffy explains that them daring to transcribe such big vignettes of queer and mortal exposure harmonized greatly with their own transitioning beyond the music. “It was at a time when I was feeling way more comfortable identifying the way that I want to identify, not being afraid to say ‘Yeah, I’m actually trans’ and being more forthcoming in spaces where I might have shrunk.” Fun House was monumental in many ways, most immediately for its portrayal of how lineal wounds and transness intersect. To get to the clarity of declaring their personhood on tape, Duffy had to also reckon with the hole that their mother’s passing left within them. The process of mourning was not a linear one, which reflects the unorthodox lifespan a trans person is forced to carry out in this world.

I’ve known Duffy for nearly four years now—all at once, a mentor, elder and light. I owe much to them and their generosity. Whenever they make music, I will write about it; each album helps me see more tomorrows. Fun House, specifically, came out at a time in my life where I was navigating the intersection of my intersex identity and my own art. Lines like “My body, a question that hangs on her lips / I know the answer / The answer, it’s always mine” were instrumental to my livelihood. Duffy’s endeavors made me think twice about what my obligations as an artist to the communities I belong to are supposed to be. What do I owe everyone else? Is it my job to constantly produce explicitly queer work? Once, I had a long phone call with the poet Kaveh Akbar, who reaffirmed within me a simple yet earth-moving truth that is also echoed in Duffy’s music-making: No matter what us queer folks make, no matter what art we call our own, it will always be queer. Our identities don’t require activation; they don’t go away if we are not speaking of them.

But whenever I get on the phone with Duffy, I know our conversations will be no-bullshit. This time, we talk at length about music criticism and what role it plays in platforming queer and trans artists, and how the selectiveness of prestige magazines is leaving folks behind who are just trying to survive. “The queer people who are given representation are not the kind of queer people who are under attack,” they say. Duffy is hesitant to include themselves in that sentence, understanding what their privilege is within all of this and how they are a “skinny, white person who can pass as she/her if needed.” “I exist within the system, too, and I want people to listen to my music and buy my records and think I’m cute, or whatever the fuck they need to listen to music. It’s a very strange time,” they add.

Even if Duffy is not headlining festivals or being used as the figurehead for corporate pride campaigns or having their songs vaulted into the zeitgeist’s viral trends and bloated streaming accolades, they still made an entire record about embracing an existence that is constantly being positioned towards death by new and damning legislation. And their work is still always at risk of worming its way into the ears of people who buy into that very same poison. “It’s like, ‘I’ll shred my little guitar for you guys,’ but, if you listen to the lyrics, these songs are really subverting a lot of the things that my ‘first-listen’ fans might be fundamentally against,” Duffy adds.

The industry is still forcing an uphill climb on the trans artists making music within it. Venture capitalistism and seven-figure label gurus are mostly to blame for this. It’s too often a competition of whose story is marketable—and, in turn, whose music will amass the most clicks online. And if you do, somehow, get a headline someplace, those words will follow you everywhere. After Pitchfork ran an article about Duffy and their guitar-playing four years ago, it became a pigeonhole that still follows them everywhere. When they released “Private Life” earlier this spring, many outlets wrote about Duffy shedding their guitar wizardry in a turn towards piano-playing—even though it’s Ethan Gruska helming the keys on that song.

So here we are, with Sugar the Bruise, a record that is not the coming out party that Fun House was but is just as essential in Duffy’s catalog—and was just as freeing to make. Who will overlook the project because it did not have a lead single like “Aquamarine,” which leveled the direction that Duffy wanted to take Hand Habits in? What do we make of a project that has no lyrical throughline within except Duffy’s existence itself? I work for a music magazine, so I know the real answer. But, as a queer person in an industry that is relatively straight and cis, I’m even more interested in Sugar the Bruise than I was Fun House. There is something beautiful and underserved about a project made after an opus. Where do we run once we’ve scattered ourselves across the table?

For Duffy, the answer was clear: “I was interested in pushing [my comfortablility] even further.” “Aquamarine” was a synth-pop deviation from their usual folk tendencies; “More Than Love” was demoed in half-time and, through SASAMI’s guidance, Duffy turned it into a double-time, energetic track. On Sugar the Bruise, they tinker with form and its elasticity. The schematics of construction and the cinema of movements and breakdowns emerge brilliantly. A song like “The Bust of Nefertiti” begins as an airy, sparse Hand Habits-centric type of composition, only to erupt into a two-minute disco instrumental at the midway point. On the booming, downtrodden crooner gem “The Gift of the Human Curse,” Duffy sends their vocals down a couple of octaves and excavates the unanswerable myth of who the greatest songwriter alive is.

After touring with him for nearly two full years, they found solace and inspiration in Mike Hadreas’ presentation of humor and finesse and delicacy in the Perfume Genius world, especially on his most recent LP—Ugly Season. “I really get to see how he pushes his own comfort zones, and his favorite thing to say—whenever we’re talking about music and I say ‘I’m scared to do this thing’—is, he’s like, ‘You can do whatever you want. You don’t have to be afraid to try something new, if it’s calling to you, musically, and, artistically, that it’s something I’m really drawn to,’” Duffy says.

Duffy carried that mantra into the writing for Sugar the Bruise, even though they didn’t have much material ready when it was time to record. It was right after a leg of the Perfume Genius tour when they tried—and failed—to cancel the first session at Panoramic Studios in Stinson Beach. Producer Luke Temple urged Duffy to still come in and, with only “Private Life” completed, they worried about the logistics of coming to a studio empty-handed. “I was like, ‘It seems like a really expensive experiment to just pay everybody to fuck around,’” they add. “But I said yes, because [Temple and Jeremy Harris] believed in me. And I think that was infectious. They know that I compulsively go towards what I’m uncomfortable with. I love to take on way too much than I can handle and then come through.”

Sugar the Bruise is, at its core, Duffy challenging themselves to not walk through the fires of their own trauma in such an immense, back-breaking way. But, if you’ve ever lived a life that has some instance(s) of devastation within its DNA, then you, too, likely know how difficult it is to write or think beyond that pain. Duffy resisted their internal algorithm’s urge to filter whatever was heavy on their mind into a song or a poem. There was a lot of freedom in making this project, even if there was also a possibility that it wouldn’t yield enough material for an album. “I had a lot of half-finished songs—half-finished ideas—because I hadn’t lived with them in my body and played them and demoed them and knew what they were going to be, in terms of their identity,” Duffy says. “I just let whatever come through, and I had to make decisions fast—because it was an experiment and Fat Possum was down to go on this journey with me, which was such a big risk. I was like, ‘I could leave the studio with nothing and that could be that.’”

Duffy considers the album’s opener, “Something Wrong,” a “stupid song,” though they aren’t so sure why that’s the descriptor that always comes to mind for it. It’s a tune about the urges of longing and the arrangements coast on headspace vibes, a kind of ease that Duffy loves—even though much of the song is in 5/4, the antithesis of time measures that get off on coasting. “It was such a moment of, ‘How can I be as direct as possible without overdoing the poetics?” they say. “Sometimes just saying the thing is the most effective [approach], rather than covering it in metaphor and allegory.”

After Fun House, Duffy took a poetry class with Elaine Kahn and learned that their work was in need of greater consolidation, that much of it was “too sweet” or filled with “too much beauty.” “The writing and recording process [for Sugar the Bruise] was similar. I wanted to have fun and I wanted to write about something that’s not me and my experience,” they say. What came of that desire, initially, was “The Gift of the Human Curse,” which, upon first listen, doesn’t sound like anything Duffy has ever made across their first trio of albums. They take on the persona of a crooning lounge singer, a style that reared its head after Temple urged Duffy to sing like Frank Sinatra “if Frank Sinatra was a muppet.” It’s humorous and light, which is perpendicular to all of Fun House, and it’s what makes Sugar the Bruise such an exciting project to spend time with.

With a short tracklist, Sugar the Bruise doesn’t have a clear centerpiece. But, a standout part of the whole project is its closer, “The Bust of Nefertiti,” a career benchmark for Duffy. It’s a song separated into acts—like some great, theatrical oeuvre—and zeros in on the titular stucco-coated bust that’s on display in the Neues Museum in Berlin. Though Duffy had never seen the sculpture before, one of their friends was obsessed with it—so the singer opted to write about the bust in the same way their friend described it to them. After playing around with the idea of personifying another person’s fascinations and finishing the song, Duffy was finally able to visit the Neues and get a glimpse of the bust while in Germany with Perfume Genius in August of 2022.

“[Seeing the bust] was even more magical, because I have such an intense relationship with it,” they say. “When you’re actually in the room in Berlin, you can’t take any photos. There’s no photos, so, this whole time, I had just been imagining this thing based on other peoples’ experiences and paintings and documentation.” Inspired by Mount Eerie’s “When I Walk out of the Museum,” especially the lyric “When I walk out of the museum / Everything I see seems rippling and alive,” Duffy wanted to conjure the feeling of seeing something so profound and then going to Berghain to dance. “Life experiencing life is so dynamic, from moment to moment. That was something I wanted to try and capture with [Sugar the Bruise], too,” they add.

On Sugar the Bruise, Duffy is just trying to revel in the same euphoria they feel while sharing a stage with Hadreas. “The stakes are lower for me and I can just experience the music,” they say. “And I was like, ‘How can I incorporate some of that into my own music?’” The aftermath of Fun House was an exhausting one that Duffy couldn’t avoid, because the album’s subject matter was such serious content they didn’t want to brush past in press conversations. It makes sense that, to move on from that chapter, a load has to be lightened somewhere. “I wanted to be like, ‘Damn, I need a break from this. I need to just have fun and be silly.’ A lot of my friends are like, ‘You’re so funny in your day-to-day life and your music is so devastating,’ and I wanted to tap into that,” Duffy adds. “And, again, [Sugar the Bruise] is still devastating. But, I’m not typically a depressed person; music has just been a channel for my processing and my experience to blossom and make sense of itself.”

That devastation comes through remarkably on “Private Life”—a song that would have been a perfect entry on Fun House, too—as Duffy sings about the shame of being in a relationship with someone who’s still in the closet. But it’s the accompanying music video that gnaws at the aesthetic Duffy wanted to inject into Sugar the Bruise altogether, in which they emphasize the ruins of desire—from the outside looking in—through immense cinematic detail. “I’m really interested in how movies can say so much without dialogue,” they say. “When I sent SASAMI the ‘Private Life’ video, she was like, ‘It reminds me of one of those boring movies you like.’ And I’m like, ‘Perfect, that’s exactly what I was going for.’”

Duffy has hopes of scoring movies in the future and evoking emotions through wordlessness, something they tried to emulate on the instrumental track “The Book On How To Change, Pt.3.” “I think that’s something that I could be super inspired by, the challenge of creating a feeling without words. I’ve been finding words insufficient sometimes, and I was interested in that with this record. There are these long instrumental parts that are very emotional to me, but I wanted to give the listener more space to inhabit their experience with the music.”

“If the music’s in your hands / You could play it on your own again / Just like before you could afford the band / You were lighter then,” Duffy sings in a shadowed, layered vocal on “Andy in Stero.” The lyrics could be positioned as a thesis statement for Sugar the Bruise, as they’ve returned to album-making with less intentions of being a practitioner of grief. And, with an eclectic assemblage of baroque and pop instruments—a clavinet, Roland Juno, vibraphone, Prophet 600, Korg MS-100, saxophone and log drum, just to name a few—in tow, this is the most ambitious and sonically nurtured album Duffy has ever made.

But what is really pragmatic about Sugar the Bruise is how normal it is. So often, what’s expected of queer artists is a body of work that tailors explicitly to their identities alone; the idea that, to be successful, you must endebt yourself to a lifetime of uncoiling your own survival for consumption from others. Fun House was this deep, rich, vulnerable offering from Duffy, who elected—when they certainly didn’t have to—to give us brief access into the trauma and transitions that have put them where they are now. But an undertaking like that is not a sustainable artistic model. Refreshingly, Sugar the Bruise lives up to its title and softens the ache that Fun House left in Duffy’s heart, marveling at the small expressions of life: yearning for someone’s adoration, picturing a great, underdocumented artifact thousands of miles away, outmuscling the shame of being in a hidden relationship, watching a friend’s life erode while being gone on tour. The album is aglow with humor, affection and fictionality.

Whether it’s a bridge to the next chapter of Hand Habits or merely a world-building exercise, Sugar the Bruise flutters with splendor even in its brevity. Duffy illustrates how vestiges of hope can sometimes arrive without a side of sobering gloom. In turn, these chapters are personal, droll, flushed and cresting; wondrously experimental and deftly consummate; a skyline of everydayness. On Sugar the Bruise, Duffy paves a new slate, growing slowly into subversive song constructions and articulating how a body might begin tumbling through familiar habitats with a romantic, curious and joyous eye. Perhaps it’s a banality that won’t make headlines, but it’s a fixture of survival that, too often, gets left behind.

Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s assistant music editor. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, but you can find him online @yogurttowne.