Harriet :: "No Way Out"

Harriet, an LA band with former ties to PAPA and Dawes, already have one of the best songs of the year, the seminal and eruptive, "I Slept With All Your Mothers." While this debut single was covered in a fun bitterness, on new release, "No Way Out", singer Alex Casnoff describes a moment last April when he ingested far too much weed and his heart stopped. It is considerably more elegiac. He was rushed to the hospital, dosed with Ativan, doctors and nurses saving his life. It's the same piano-base of "Mothers," though more episodic and sparse, a progression toward literal death and then the slow march away. Casnoff outlines this feeling of dying: "you've seen how your body reacts, you've lost control, your body is nowhere," he intones before describing, quite literally, his experiences in the hospital, a doctor who gave him water, someone calling his name. "No Way Out" isn't an anti-drug polemic, rather a mediation on powerlessness against the backdrop of a specific and almost cataclysmic error. The final movement is vocoder harmony, Casnoff and many layers of his own voice singing, "if you hold on, it'll be alright."



Download: Harriet - "No Way Out"