One of the most hyped Bay Area records of 2025 wraps itself in heavy motifs of tribulations and transformations. Borrowing from Mesopotamian lore, the album's set dressings harken back to a story about a goddess discovering the chthonic realm whilst making her descent through the seven gates of the underworld. Sacrificing all material garments, accessories, and armor at every level; Inanna is killed by her sister Ereshkigal, then later brought back to life, is haunted by demons, who sends the shepherd Dumuzid into the underworld as a sacrifice, later amending the punishment as a rotation between the shepherd and his sister Geshtinanna.

The Sumerian story offers an explanation for the seasons, the butter churning cycles of pleasure and pain, the sundial spin of birth and death, the enrichment of growth and the blooming patina of decay. Solstices and the evolution of epochs flow like fleeting ephemera swept up like seeds from wild wisher weeds in the tumbling breeze. The tale symbolizes the mechanics and harbingers of change, triumph, defeat, rebirth, renewal, return, and resolve.

A mythos discovered in a literature course with poet Ariana Reines, it struck a major chord with Oakland-based artist Sarah Gagnon of Hectorine. The cycles at work echo the alienation and inverted universes experienced in the pandemic, resounding into today’s expanding abyss of an uncertainty reality that has become our unfortunate new normal. Gagnon parallels those archaic interdimensional allegories with the revelations and revolutions of recent years and current days like a grandiose tragic pop opera that blends pangs of helplessness in hand with the heroics of starry-eyed hope.

This is the prelude to Arrow of Love, the new album by Hectorine. The latest chapter in a lauded and revered pop oeuvre that follows up Live at Lost Church, Tears, and the self-titled — Sarah immerses the audience in the chansons that float between worlds alongside fellow creative visionaries Geoff Saba, Max Shanley, Jon Wujcik, Joel Robinow, Betsy Gran, J.J. Golden, et al. It is no hyperbole to describe this album as one of the year’s most anticipated release in the Bay, a collection of industrial symphonies that traverse the under-worlds and outer-worlds of the most intimate realms of our own personal communities and consciousness.

The beaded and bedazzled curtain lifts on the mood setting "Is Love An Illusion", positing the spirit dizzying pastoral "These Hills", artfully adapting / further contributing to the L. Cohen canon on "No Hallelujah", to grandiose sweeping numbers like "Throw Caution To The Wind" that is dedicated to the tightrope acts of risk taking. "Heart of Stone" sails valiantly on a Fleetwood-crafted canoe in pursuits of uninhibited empathy, keeping the energy upbeat and achingly earnest with "Roses & Thorns", arriving at the altar of reflections on the mystical title track that is given a further sophisti-pop sheen (courtesy of Saba's sax). The voyage continues into the choppy waters of "Take a Chance With Me" that seeks a sacred sanctuary from the storm, closing with the trad folk allegories and observations of time's passage with the wispy windsails of "Slip Through My Fingers".

Presenting the debut of “Everybody Says”, a magnificent ballad that slow dances like a lonely night spent at a highway-side dive that humbly sits on the corner edges at the world’s end. Hectorine draws portraits of solitude, swaying in a saxophone inflected stoic solemnity like smoldering ships gently streaming down the river Nile. “Everybody Says” is steeped in the introspective sadness of confronting the hurt from the seismic shifts where the continental drifts of relationship discontinuity take away a piece of the self. Sarah and the whole ensemble echo the sullen song experienced and felt by all during the days of sheltering in place. A velvet stage curtain enrobes the song like a security blanket that offers comfort on a long and lonely night. Hectorine lets the audience in to feel the feelings that stir in the wake of the disturbances that change us, altering the course of our paths while challenging the objectives and subjects of our desires.

Featuring visuals directed, filmed, and edited by Karina Gill; "Everybody Says" is transformed into an art house short film. An emphasis on feeling alone in the crowd is conveyed through a montage of vintage city sidewalk scenes and classic dance events spliced alongside screen tests of ingenues embracing the ennui of indolent interludes. Karina highlights bandleader Sarah starting her morning, gazing out the window, making coffee, eggs, peeling an orange, all with the symbolic broken bonds of chains seen displayed on the kitchen table. We view the artist applying lipstick and getting ready to greet the day while the spoken words of, and for the record I will never ever, ever, ever, love again are recited as our gallant and valorous protagonist leaves the house and crosses a footbridge into the windy wilderness.

Sarah Gagnon of Hectorine provided the following notes on the inspirations that guided “Everybody Says”:

When I wrote “Everybody Says” I was, against my wishes, alone and bereft in 2020 and I was so heartbroken I truly believed that I would never love again. I wasn’t quite at the nadir of my suffering yet, but I was close. The katabasis has begun. The only thing separating me from rock bottom was my flagrant self delusion. When you’re still clinging to some shred of hope. This song is really about the disconnect between how you see yourself, and how everyone else views the situation. When the truth is too hard to bear, when it’s easier to lie to yourself. But the lie is exactly what keeps you stagnating in your misery. I remember that at this time I was listening to Julee Cruise’s Floating Into The Night on repeat. Over and over and over. And I think that inspired the spoken word bit at the end. It was co-producer/engineer Geoff Saba’s idea but he’s a huge Julee fan, too, and he knew I’d been listening to that record.

I wanted the song to start out very simply, all stripped down, just synth and vocals, and then slowly build into something beautiful — adding piano, 12-string guitar, more delicate, celestial synths, saxophone, bass, drums — even though the lyrics are so sad. To start from a place of utter desolation and little by little crawl out of it. When we recorded vocals for that song I wasn’t in that place anymore, in fact I was so far from it I could hardly recognize who it was that wrote the song, and yet — I couldn’t get through a take without crying. Which made me think that I really captured that moment, to be able to connect with it so viscerally years later. I suppose it’s almost a time capsule of heartbreak.

The first time I performed this song was in 2020, right after I’d written it. I was studying with Ariana Reines who had started Invisible College. I’d heard about it from my friend Jesse Carsten up in Portland who had read the previous text, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. I missed that one but read it on my own and then dove right into Inanna, an ancient Sumerian text, and at some point there was a call for us students to share our work. I hadn’t written poetry proper (aside from song lyrics) in many, many years, so I decided to perform “Everybody Says”. Just in my apartment over Zoom on my piano. In retrospect it feels like a very 2020 thing to do.

Hectorine’s album Arrow of Love will be available May 23 via Take a Turn Records.

PREMIERE | Hectorine, "Everybody Says"