Fresh from making their critically acclaimed live debuts at Australian festivals UNIFY Gathering and Groovin’ The Moo and polishing off their biggest ever national headlining tour, Eora/Sydney alt-rock force RedHook have returned with their most gut-wrenching single to date, ‘Jabberwocky‘, produced by Stevie Knight (Stand Atlantic, Yours Truly) and mixed by James Paul Wisner (Underoath, Paramore).
‘Jabberwocky’ is an intensely personal song that addresses vocalist Emmy Mack’s experience of being sexually assaulted while on RedHook’s first ever overseas tour.
Using the metaphor of the Jabberwocky (a fictional monster from the Alice In Wonderland mythos which, in the Irwin Allen film adaptation, Alice is ultimately able to vanquish by convincing herself it doesn’t exist), the song centres on Emmy’s coping process of denying her own trauma and the monster who inflicted it in order to effectively “go on with the show”.
Menacing guitars and frenetic synths charge beneath Mack’s powerful vocals, building into a psychotic dubstep-inspired breakdown before the vulnerable chorus lyrics take centre stage.
Emmy explains the inspiration behind the track: “As difficult as this song was to write, I felt like it was something I had to do. One of the main ways I cope when horrible things happen in life is by listening to music. But when this happened to me, for the very first time, I couldn’t find a song that resonated with what I was going through. Isn’t it strange that we’ve heard so many stories about high-profile male predators in the heavy music space over the past few years, and yet there are so few songs in the genre that deal with sexual assault itself from a female perspective? I really wanted to help change that.”
