Prewn, 18 Wheeler

**Prewn**

**18 Wheeler**

If Izzy Hagerup’s new album, System, feels immediately uncompromising it’s because it was never really designed for public consumption. Released under her Prewn moniker, Hagerup describes the album as a “private journal made public.” The arresting nine songs on System chronicle a deeply personal journey through the darkness of depression, but one that’s always undercut by moments of humor as well as selfishness and self-reflection–a push-and-pull that feels wholly distinctive.

Following on Prewn’s 2023’s debut album Through The Window–a collection of songs that Pitchfork hailed as a “striking example of Hagerup’s ability to sit with ugliness”– System finds her crawling even deeper into the dense folds of the night. Hagerup alone wrote and recorded the album, mostly in long stretches of bedroom sessions that found her working through the night until she began to hear birdsong. System reckons with a lot of the thoughts that tend to needle in during those small hours: guilt, shame, and self-absorption, as well as the societal pressures that sit at the root of such things.

“This new album comes from a much more self-centered place, the stagnant aftermath of intensity and emotion,” Hagerup says. “I think it came from a period of time that was more numb, hollow, and confused. More disassociated from heartfelt pain, more entrenched in a frustrating and aimless discomfort.”

That discomfort manifests itself in various ways throughout System. Each of the songs were a result of random inspiration, and find Hagerup working out of a desperation to record the pieces before the inspiration slipped through her fingers. “I feel in a constant state of writer’s block but I just put myself in the studio for hours and hours, sometimes in agony and desperation for any muse at all,” she explains. “Every once in a blue moon, a nugget gets thrown my way and I run as far as I can with it.”

The result is a wildly unique album that carries a sense of restlessness and unease in its bones, but also pulls the curtain back on what it takes and what it means to fully explore the self through song. “It seems that misery’s my best friend. I know it’ll come to me again and again...” Hagerup sings on the title track. Written while feeling acutely overwhelmed in a sea of people, the song touches upon everything from the mechanisms of the music industry, to cycles of depression, to the seemingly never- ending battle to escape the clutches of the patriarchy and capitalism. “When I wrote it I was supposed to be present and alive and gracious and happy. But somehow I couldn’t escape my own internal fears and depression that can follow me wherever I go,” she says.

Pulling together a number of the System’s key sentiments, “Dirty Dog” is like an intense fever dream–a song where the listener can never quite find their footing within the glitchy, malaise-like backdrop of its scorched instrumentation.