Starly Kind makes an offering with their new single, “This Heart Eaten Raw.”

On their new single, “This Heart Eaten Raw,” Starly Kind makes an offering. The single is the first from the multi-disciplinary artist (and Eleven alum), ahead of an upcoming album that feels as though it’s been years in the making, and couldn’t come soon enough. The song is at once a cry, a demand, and a gift, drenched in the sacrificial violence of a heart torn out and passed from self to other, bright and bitterly metallic on the tongue, staining everything it touches. 

In some ways all art is about presentation, just as all gender is performance, but “This Heart Eaten Raw” situates these conceptual truisms intimately within the body of the artist: 

I’m made of horrors 

I’ll never understand

Others seem to slough sludge off

Made of stuff that tough was

What it was was us.

To be a person is a painful incarnation, a series of exposures which we can slough off or incorporate into ourselves, all the while forming the new exterior of our personhood. For Starly, this constant reformation of the self, oriented around questions of their own gender identity and struggles to conform to the expectations placed on them, is a process of toughening, a kind of callous growth which may or may not ultimately protect what’s underneath.

The song itself is uses that juxtaposition as it’s structure, with the sections roughly corresponding to the outside/inside dichotomy. “This Heart Eaten Raw” begins with the guttural chant over restless guitar, a hard facade, before moving into the bridge section, featuring complimentary vocal and guitar lines which ascend in unexpected intervals before settling back into their tougher, more aggressive state. Musically, Starly resists genre descriptors, existing instrumentally between elements of metal, jazz, and more, layering vocals, saying the same words with different energies, in different modalities. All of it points to their underlying thesis, which is that they are not what you might expect.

“This Heart Eaten Raw” posits that art must be an offering, that for meaning to emerge it must be given freely and consumed fresh, in an act of generous vulnerability. Only then can the self coalesce around what is no longer the locust of pain, and is instead the source of nourishment. It’s through this self-inflicted violence of exposure, this offering of the heart up for consumption, that we arrive at something true, raw, and full of life.