This Hisses - VUE Weekly

An inability to experience pleasure in situations commonly found enjoyable. For such a grave condition, the clinical diagnosis attached sounds rather elegant: anhedonia.

“We are not people that experience anhedonia in our lives, but for us, it is a really important poetic term,” explains This Hisses vocalist/bassist Julia Ryckman. Titling the group's sophomore release after the psychological state, Anhedonia is indeed a place where darkness and beauty collide, with Ryckman’s massive voice cutting a haunting and heady swath through the heavy rock chaos that her bandmates conjure.

“In the title track the protagonist is singing about the suffers of desire, the suffers of passion and this sort of wonderment of, ‘Wow, what if I could be free from this?’” says Ryckman. “A meditative thing of ‘What would it be like to be free from desire, free from passion, to cease chasing those things?’ and to be in this state where you don’t experience those things and therefore don’t pursue them.”

Grand and cinematic—the Winnipeg band often speaks to each other in film references, saying, for example, they want a song to sound like a David Lynch or Wim Wenders movie—This Hisses has indulged the more glamorous aspects of their personalities on this project.

“I’m enamored with divas,” admits Ryckman, whose formal musical education is as an opera singer. “I can’t get enough of Nicki Manaj and Lady Gaga—in controlled amounts. So I guess I can say I can get enough. But it’s that world of presentation, where someone steps on stage and they are not just themselves, they are something else—there’s a transformation. That happens to me. That happens to our drummer. It’s a becoming of something else and it makes sense to take that and you exaggerate that, you go big with it.”

In a way, Anhedonia is a misdirection. Leaning hard towards the dramatic, and mixing both, as Ryckman puts it, “violence and gentleness, darkness and prettiness,” This Hisses isn't offering up an absence of emotion, but, instead, a flood.

VUE Weekly