Akurei's 'HAIRDYE' Is His Most Personal Work [Premiere]

You can’t escape the weather analogies on Akurei’s latest EP HAIRDYE.

The beautiful melodies and plucky tones are soft as a clearing sky, the sadly self-aware lyrics linger like still-wet air warming in the sun. It’s a song with organic construction - it was written on guitar before morphing into the production ripe atmosphere of Ableton. Yet even in its complete form you can tell the song never denies the oxygen of the story it is trying to tell - a story of thwarted love. A condition never to be eclipsed. You know the feeling - transitional complexity, like always changing weather. That emotion culminates in the song’s title and greatest line: “but you change your mind like hair dye.” Who hasn’t been left there by a complex paramour, unshielded from the elements, left bare and contemplative?

The poetic scene that Connor Grant, AKA Akurei, structures with his intimate lyrics feels almost intrusive; a moment in someone’s room when they aren’t there, the bareness of their daily routine obvious before you. That mood was deliberate. It’s his second EP, also titled HAIRDYE and to Grant, it’s personal. “It feels a little more transparent and rawer for me,” he said, “Which I always admire in the music I love.” The song taught him something about himself. “It was a cathartic song to put together,” he said.

If you can tolerate the voyeuristic feeling the song imbues, you will learn a little bit about what a modern pop storm sounds like as well.