Sacred Hearts, an Australian post-punk act with a sound steeped in sacrilege and solemnity, summons the ghostly echoes of a bygone religious upbringing. At its core, vocalist June Gray channels the sepulchral imagery of her youth, weaving a soundscape as reverent as it is raw. The origin story of Sacred Hearts is rooted in serendipity, a meeting of two kindred spirits—June and Josie—bonded through shared memories of Catholic schooling and a kinship born of both ritual and rebellion. The music evokes familiar shades of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and Joy Division, but Sacred Hearts doesn’t simply haunt old graves; an ethereal shimmer à la Cocteau Twins adds new colors to the darkness. A stark drum machine pulses like a distant, broken heartbeat, slicing through their liturgical undertones with a cutting, mechanized chill.
Their debut EP, Siren Songs, is a baptism of anger, sensuality, and the turbulence of girlhood. Nearly two years in the making since their debut single dropped in 2021, the record is a celebration of loss, desire, and the burning rage of the feminine experience. Free from the confines of a single genre, it dances between influences as diverse as The Cocteau Twins, Swans, Ride, and The Gun Club. A quiet river of longing and grief courses through the EP, its waters binding every track.
A current of water ties each song, flowing through the EP like a quiet river of longing and loss. It opens with Holly Golightly’s voice from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, calling out to her brother, adrift and uncertain, setting the tone for Is it Cold?—a question laced with isolation. A frigid lament, the song unfolds with synths as icy as the title suggests, and guitars drenched in melancholy. June’s vocals pierce through the chill, stark and powerful, echoing isolation.
The Ophelia Complex surfaces as a sorrow-filled dance, where a woman’s spirit drifts between desire and duty, innocence and despair, her identity slipping into shapes others impose upon her. In the next track, Concrete Bikini, this complex is reimagined in the sunlit quiet of Brisbane’s Enoggera Reservoir, exploring the early pangs of helplessness and the silent weight of being trapped in the expectations of new love. The song wades through themes of submission and self-erasure, tracing the familiar ache of yearning for one’s own voice amidst the pull of a partner’s influence. The song is shimmering dream pop, awash in droning sounds, glistening tones, and spellbinding vocals that soar through the mix.
Godless is delivered like an And Also the Trees tune, with its spoken words buoyed over a droning soundscape. The poetic interlude offers a raw reflection, a stark pause to consider the world’s brittle state. Shaped by the weight of late-stage capitalism, where greed tips the scales, and resources are prized over human lives, the band casts humanity adrift, somewhere between salvation and damnation. It’s a purgatorial cry—a lament for a species bent on self-destruction, stumbling through a wasteland of its own making, suffering under the consequences of its own sins. The song feels like an indictment and a reckoning, a dark mirror held up to a civilization blinded by its hunger for power and profit, barreling toward collapse.
The fall of Eden is the world’s first wound—a perfect garden broken by desire, innocence splintered in a grasp for forbidden knowledge. What began in beauty twisted into exile, as man’s hunger outweighed paradise. From that fateful bite onward, Eden’s echo lingers, a lost sanctuary haunting human hearts. Blind Faith deals with the bitter angst of a failed relationship, reimagining the story of Eden in a personal context. The basslines and percussion nod to The Cure’s Faith, enveloping the narrative of innocence lost and desire’s poisonous aftermath.
With a Jazzy Western twang, evoking The Bad Seeds and The Birthday Party, Virgin/Whore seethes with spite, tangled in the relentless snare of the Madonna-Whore complex—a cruel paradox imposed upon women, twisted into words by Freud himself. The song thrashes and bites, a furious anthem for those trapped in this absurd binary. It rails against society’s fixation, where a woman is either revered or condemned, purity or sin, never whole. It’s a lament, a rage, a biting reflection on the weight of expectation, where identity is sliced and labeled, where freedom is strangled by roles designed to confine. The song rages for every woman bound by this brutal, enduring myth. “In this track, I air my grievance of never being seen as a whole person, but as either the object of desire or something small and sweet—until the veil is broken. To be a woman in a man’s world is to be objectified, commodified,” says the band.
The EP closes with Crocodile Tears, a track soaked in industrial grit, its pulse borrowed from the ‘90s club scene yet tethered to Sacred Hearts’ post-punk roots. Guitars bite and snarl as the song snaps and lunges with unrepentant ferocity. It’s a primal, unapologetic closing statement, bristling with a dangerous energy that refuses to be tamed.
Listen to Siren Songs below:
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