The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart

The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart is a Balearic record, though not one that's inspired by those fabled Iberian sun-kissed beaches that stretch on forever and sunsets that stop you in your tracks. Rather, it's a House record made for all night dancing in a decommissioned steelwork. It's an ambient record that strolls a windswept coastline where lime-grass dunes rise and fall like slumbering megafauna. The album walks the ugly, lovely industrial coastline of the North East of England, stopping at points to soak up the breathtaking scenery and watch everyday life carrying on in the face of rapid deindustrialisation.

Of this, the title track and fourth single from the album, Sally writes…

"Some of my earliest memories formed the lyric forThe Girl with a Hole in Her Heart. I thought about the first things I remembered - images, feelings, sounds – and extrapolated the idea that these things ultimately shape our character, into the basis of the song. I remember some undefined adult talking about the girl next door having 'a hole in her heart', a wildly visual and evocative image for a child to comprehend. I remember seeing my mother's crimplene dress (a miracle fabric manufactured at nearby ICI) frozen, as though she were still inside it, on the washing line among the metal beer kegs in the back yard. At the end of the street there were huge (or so they seemed) industrial slag heaps where I used to play with the neighbour's kids and my siblings. I remember the feeling of the shale-like slag slipping underneath my feet as we clambered up and down them. Other, more hazy but significant images from my early life make up the rest of the abstract but deeply autobiographical lyric and we drew musical influence from tracks by Italo dance producers like Alexander Robotnik, or from the Yello, Sparks and early Human League tracks we love".