This new single from Selina Gin unfortunately passed us by a few weeks back but I’m grateful I was able to find and salvage it before it went into the choppers.
I get the impression Selina isn’t the sort of woman to be messed with.
When she released her previous single, ‘Hey, Gatekeeper <3’ earlier this year after a couple of years absence following her 2022 debut album, ‘Patiently Waving’, she was expressing her frustration at having to stand in front of the industry’s ‘gatekeepers’ (record label executives) and not being able to call them out because she “had been away” on maternity leave.
The subject matter of this second single of 2025,’Hurts like a Mother’, carries more gravitas, although, mercifully, not as much as I feared.
When I first read the press release I thought it concerned having to give up a child into permanent social care because you don’t have the ability to look after it.
As it turns out the storyline is slightly lighter, more innocent and matter of fact as it deals with having to surrender a child to a day care centre while you work, because of “these bills I have to pay” and “the rent’s too damn high”; lines that anyone of a certain age in the UK will remember from the infamous social issue-focused plays and TV dramas of the 1960s/70s and 80s like Cathy Come Home, Boys from the Blackstuff and from the many pregnant female victims of the womanising Alfie, not to mention the red hot lyricism of Carter USM in the 90s, and Squeeze with their immortal ‘Up the Junction’, in which roles were reversed.
Lighter than it might have been, yes, but it still packs a punch with lines like,
“On the move, but on my mind/Could I afford to work less time/Should I leave this life behind?”
You know, in all the time I’ve been doing this reviewing lark I can’t remember any song from the Nordics which dealt with these issues, although I’m sure they exist to the same degree as they did in rundown 1960s Notting Hill in London.
The single disappointment to me is that in the final verse she allows herself to be sidetracked into generalised Socialist Worker-style agit prop;
“Hey I’m no eco-o-onomist/But maybe if we ta-a-ax the rich/And equal pay for every gender there is/Then we could spend more time with our kids?”
Putting the gender comment aside there is much to be said for Selina’s politico-economic position but it does cheapen the main message in my view, which is a shame.
That said, it might have gone on for another verse to throw other critical factors into the ring.
Musically, the electro-pop song (‘Hey, Gatekeeper <3’ was a bass-driven rocker not dissimilar in style from Dragonette’s ‘Hello’) is more upbeat than you might anticipate given its meaning, the melody is strong and it is enlivened by a delicious ‘Ooh-ooh’ vocal sound that channels S10’s in the 2022 Dutch Eurovision entrant song ‘De diepte’.
That’s a particular winning talent that I for one would like to see her develop in the future.
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