‘Chasing a high through rave music got dark’: Aya on hexes, Huddersfield and her hardcore horror electronics

A revelation at Pontins fuelled the producer to avant garde acclaim. But with ‘sublime’ sounds came struggles with substances. Her intense new album peels back the plaster

‘Kissed by a witch, I got hexed!” Aya howls through a storm of screaming electronics and bass groans on I Am the Pipe I Hit Myself With. The song revisits a time before Aya Sinclair was one of the UK avant garde’s most exciting talents – when she was still a Huddersfield teenager, newly into Christian rock. The music gave her “this tingly, bubbly sensation”, she says. “And someone said: ‘This is the holy spirit.’” The experience led her to join a Pentecostal congregation for a couple of years, but after confiding in a church friend about some “feelings” – Sinclair would later come out as a trans woman – she was “kicked out for being queer, essentially. I was given an ultimatum, to either closet myself or leave.” As she whispers in this track, over the quickening click of a Geiger counter, “they had me out on a witch-hunt, when I found myself”.

It’s a suitably vulnerable, conflicted opener to her new album Hexed!, which plays out in a lurching mix of heavy metal and hardcore electronics. The record sounds twisted and contorted, wincing at the pain of “peeling back the plaster”, she says over a video call. She is warm, funny and seemingly at peace – following the traumas and battles with substance abuse that she revisits on this nightmarish, alien album.