Lande Hekt Exposes Life Under Her Own Terms on ‘Going to Hell’

There was a time when Lande Hekt was going through the motions, pretending everything was fine, because if she exposed the truth about her sexuality, everything would collapse around her—or so she thought. Traversing this transitional time, reflecting on suppression, self-acceptance, and her ultimate revelation, Hekt’s solo debut, Going to Hell (Get Better Records), is her endearing, lo-fi narrative on coming to terms with being gay.

“It wasn’t until I wrote some songs that I realized what a huge turning point it was to start liking who I actually am,” says the British artist, and lead singer of punk band The Muncie Girls. “I was convinced that if I let myself be gay then my whole world would implode. The total opposite happened. My whole world expanded.”

On Going to Hell, a follow up to 2018 EP Gigantic Disappointment, the emotional turbulence of coming out maneuvers around Hekt’s more tender, indie-pop stories, streaming off opener “Whiskey,” a portal into her life, and a song full of questions she needed to answer to get to where she is now: Is it saying goodbye to who you were back then / Is it the feeling of not having to pretend? “The whole song is about hiding who you really are from yourself,” she says.

There’s also a running theme of being displaced on the record, says Hekt. “I wrote ‘Hannover’ about being on my first tour where I was completely by myself and how new that experience felt,” she says. “‘Stranded in Berlin’ is exactly what it sounds like, a song about when I had my passport held at an embassy in Germany after our tour finished, and I couldn’t get back home for five weeks.”

The empowering angst of “Undone” finds Hekt reclaiming her happiness, while “December” conveys the crippling shyness of being attracted to someone for the first time. “Going to Hell” unravels more of her initial distress and no longer wanting to be ruled by a fear of being rejected in Well you’re doing fine and you’re well / But the Catholics think you’re going to hell… Your friends from home keep acting strange when you try to be yourself for a change.

“I always try to balance out dark or depressing songs with ones that feel a bit more energetic, or at least more hopeful,” says Hekt. “It’s easy to get carried away writing self-indulgently sad songs, but when it comes down to it, I don’t want to be a whiney emo, and I’m often at risk of being one.”

Hekt adds, “There is so much to be hopeful about and I want to put out songs that encourage people to look forward as well as back. Unfortunately, sometimes I do get carried away with cynicism.”  

Never meant as a grim title to the previous year, Going to Hell was the frankest description of how Hekt felt coming out, and the ways homophobia and heteronormative culture can make one feel isolated and scared of being themselves, something the singer says she internalized for a long time.

“’Going to Hell’ was as dramatic a phrase as the feeling that I had about how doomed I was when I really gave it some thought,” says Hekt. “I was also thinking about how people in traditional religious circumstances might feel conflicted when it comes to their faith and their sexuality.”

Each track, with the exception of “Stranded in Berlin,” which Hekt initially scrapped then reworked later one, were pieced together over a seven-month period following Gigantic Disappoinment.

“The songs feel like they’re all part of a significant time in my life,” says Hekt. “Most of them were barely finished or totally half-baked when I took them to the session and built them up into full songs as we went along.” 

Recorded with producer Ben David of The Hard Aches during a solo tour in the Adelaide Hills in Australia prior to the pandemic in February 2020, Hekt laid down all the instruments on the album with the exception of percussion. 

Quickly flying back home afterwards before the world shutdown, Hekt admits that once the lockdown began she imagined creating zines full of her drawings, writing several albums, and even a book during this time off the road.

In actuality, the past year has been more of a creative struggle as she’s been grappling with focusing, writing, and completing songs. “I barely picked up my guitar for most of it,” shares Hekt, “and I only drew things that I’d promised I would.”

Sitting with these songs over the past year, Going to Hell‘s tracks naturally shifted in meaning over time for Hekt.

“I don’t think that I know exactly what a song means to me, or about me, when I write it,” says Hekt, who adds that “Whiskey” was initially written when she started feeling burned out from working. It wasn’t until she recorded the track that she realized it was about coming to terms with her queerness.  

“I’m normally just getting down something that’s been on my mind,” says Hekt. “It’s a strange process for me. I’ll be feeling a bit weird and then start singing a melody that I’ve had stuck in my head, and words just happen. Once I hear them back ages later I’ll know what it was that I was on about.”

Still, Hekt recognizes some significant shifts in how she is approaching music today.

“I’ve definitely evolved a lot in the sense that now I’m an openly queer artist, and I include those themes in my songs,” says Hekt. “I’m also more comfortable now with writing and recording solo songs [and] the sounds that I had imagined. In between every record I write I change a little bit, or a lot, and I get more experienced writing songs. It’s not necessarily a significant development… likely just time passing.”