They certainly are, Iris.
She has bucked the trend by lengthening her artist name from the previous, simple first name into Iris Caltwait and I’m usually drawn to artists that do something unexpected and seemingly pointless. (Plain simple ‘iris’ does have a ring to it, don’t you think?)
To be fair there are four other artists called just Iris as well as Emmy the Great’s seminal song so she deserves the benefit of the doubt.
AI will tell you all this but I’ll say the words anyway. Iris won Årets Urørt (Newcomer of the Year) recognition in Norway in 2019. She has released a couple of EPs and one album to date, ‘love and other disasters’ in 2021, to considerable acclaim.
She likes the lower case, and parentheses.
She has toured extensively, including with AURORA. The kudos are starting to mount up.
She tells us that “This song (‘these are hard times’) is about the tension of wanting to rip off the bandage but being stuck in the moment where no one dares to make the first move. It’s about the loneliness that grows in that silence.”
I’ll ask you to put your own interpretation on that cryptic message but I assume she refers to having the balls to move to end a relationship painfully instead of letting it drag on even more painfully because the other person in the relationship simply hasn’t got the balls to do that. Well, metaphorically speaking.
There’s a smart line early on that prepares the groundwork: “We keep all the demons alive/speaking our minds/but don’t listen.”
And then,
“Oh, but what do lovers do on their islands?
Sit around and suffer in silence?
Have a strong premonition that life isn’t meant for
The ones who can’t handle the fire”
I wondered if at that moment she was invoking some arcane moment from ‘Love Island’. It would fit the bill.
Further verses suggest the imagery of opening each other up and kissing the damage better, of losing each others’ minds, and the dichotomy between her smiling in photographs and telling white lies about her real feelings.
It concludes with the metaphor of her “laughing with a broken heart” like a clown, wishing that she could just “say the words.”
It’s a deep song that will quite probably vary in its meaning with every listen. It is dark without being bleak but without even a hint of light at the end of the tunnel
Vocally and lyrically, she conjures up in my mind an amalgam of British artists including the aforementioned Emmy (and also with the simply strummed acoustic guitar) and the Princess of Darkness herself, Polly Scattergood, with Iris’ high pitched and slightly breathless delivery and that clever little pause in the music to deliver a key line as prose.
I like the way that it builds from a ballad to an anthem, sacrificing acoustic simplicity on the altar of synthesised orchestration, a washboard being replaced by a full kit and then just fades away with the realisation that those words just won’t come.
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iriscaltwait
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