Jackie Hayes Shares Debut EP TAKE IT, LEAVE IT

Today, Chicago-based singer and guitarist Jackie Hayes shares her new EP, take it, leave it, out via AWAL. Jackie wrote and performed the contents, with engineering and mastering was done by bedroom pop singer Billy Lemos (Omar Apollo, Still Woozy, Quiet Luke) Lead single "headache" previously premiered via the FADER, a rowdy, cathartic signal of the EP to come.

Recorded in two weeks in March 2020, take it, leave it details Jackie's life as a 19-year-old musician surviving in a new city. She recorded her vocals, guitar, and bass at night between her shifts at a grocery store, a balancing act reflected in the frustration and weariness in Jackie's forceful wail. The EP's mixture of punk vocals and wonky bedroom pop resounds with defiance as well as exasperation. Instruments drone ("enemy") and skip ("days of winter") around Jackie, stuck in the monotonous exhaustion of everyday life: "Everything is so goddamned boring it just makes me wanna scream."

"After months of touring in the Fall and trying to balance pursuing music and holding down a job, I was in a bad place," Hayes reveals. "I saw this project as, 'you can take these songs, or you can leave them.'"

Jackie Hayes (born August 17, 1999) is a Chicago-based musician that melds working-class frustrations and the growing pains of young adulthood into driving, passionate indie rock. Raised in Waukegan, IL, Hayes came to music through an adolescence spent sneaking into shows, rejecting a strict Christian background, and working retail to pay her own bills. After a slew of singles garnered online attention and a cult following, Hayes moved to Chicago at age 19 and began immersing herself in the city's new wave of genreless DIY artistry, going on to share stages with the likes of Claud, Role Model, and The Japanese House.

take it, leave it is Hayes' debut EP; in moniker and execution, it's a four-song distillation of the ongoing struggle to break free from the monotony of life while finding oneself longing for somewhere to belong. Produced in tandem with Billy Lemos, Hayes indulges her darker impulses with music that surges like a chokehold, and often careens like a nightmare. These are brief, breathtaking glimpses into the mind of an artist slowly carving her niche, powered by an endearing vulnerability - in prose and performance - and unwavering resilience in the face of rejection and entitlement.

Photo Credit: Nate Guenther