“33”

My introduction to Marika Hackman came through her 2024 album Big Sigh, a record I loved. Dark, intricate, unsettling, and absolutely gorgeous, it had a way of making intimate songs feel enormous. Hackman could take difficult emotions and give them a physical presence, creating music that felt deeply personal while leaving room for listeners to find their own connections in it. She has a knack for making physical intimacy and private emotions feel tactile and earthy, almost as if complicated feelings were forces of nature. It was one of my favorite albums of 2024.

So when I saw that Hackman was releasing a new single, “33,” ahead of her next album, False Dogs (due out February 19, 2027), I was excited to spend time with her music again and get a glimpse of what’s coming.

“33” takes something many of us recognize and turns it into a beautiful, expansive song. There’s a particular kind of anxiety that comes with looking at your life at a certain age. You think about where you expected to be, the choices you made along the way, and the milestones we create for ourselves.

Hackman captures that uneasy space in a song that sounds both intimate and expansive. She creates an atmosphere that starts out sparse but gradually grows until the music feels almost deafening. Sometimes, that crescendo can feel like the weight of a song’s subject crushing you, but here, it feels more uplifting, as though the music is finding a way through all that uncertainty.

“33” isn’t a song that wallows in everything that might have gone wrong. There’s a sense of acceptance running through it, along with wonder and hope. That comes through in the swelling layers of sound and the choir of voices, which keep the song from becoming mournful.

That ability to begin with something inward and personal before building into something immense is one of the reasons I gravitate toward Hackman’s music. She knows how to make those transitions feel natural. The music grows around the emotion rather than simply making the song louder, giving it room to expand until the arrangement becomes something you can almost physically feel.

“33” leaves me excited for False Dogs. If the rest of the album builds on what Hackman accomplishes here, we could be in for another record that finds something profound in those uncomfortable spaces.

Verdict: Masterpiece

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