A Hatchie song is immediately transportive--a celestial collision of shoe gaze and pop, a haze of reverb-laden guitar lines and lyrics acutely charting a vivid flood of emotions, about anything from falling in love to anxieties about your own identity.It’s a map of Harriette Pilbeam’s interior world, wrapped up in gauzy, wall-of-sound daydreams. The Brisbane, Aus. native behind the moniker makes music that’s hook-laden and thoughtful, dreamy and dense, and, above all, immediately recognizable as Hatchie. “This Enchanted” is Hatchie’s new single, that captures the intense rush of love, the way you can plunge into those feelings the same way you could drown in a Hatchie song--a tidal wave of swirling textures, kaleidoscopic guitars and layers of twinkling synths, but with intensified energy. Consider it, if you will, a reintroduction to Hatchie’s sound.
For Pilbeam, “This Enchanted” offers a clean slate: a bubbling, refreshing energy and explicitly pop structure. It’s something Pilbeam says she sorely needed for the project--she had been longing for a reset, getting bogged down in heaviness and more intensely emotional songs. Still, for all the effervescent pop sheen, there’s Pilbeam’s cerebral introspection at the core, a quietly anxious hum beneath a lush landscape of sonics--she continues to feel deeply, and embraces that vulnerability. She captures how you can be enthralled by a relationship, despite its imperfections. The track showcases Pilbeam as an empathetic and accessible songwriter with a genuine knack for making space for the listeners in her song, tapping into a relatability that's both intimate and universal. Punctuated by an oversized bass line, “This Enchanted” is a dusky, nebulous glimmer, envisioning Hatchie on the dance floor, essentially capturing a creative spark on tape. For Pilbeam, it felt like a lightbulb moment in her songwriting, a burst of creative energy and sudden inspiration for the new places she’d take Hatchie from the initial waves of success. A new direction inviting more movement, more fun--diverting away from shoe gaze and inviting the listener to look up, too.
