Sinister women
Aldous Harding and why it's nice to have a hero
I try to resist, but every spring the wave of awards season and fashion week content drags me under. By the end of it I am fatigued by its shiny, textureless extroversion. I hate to sound Red Pilled like Ricky Gervais, but the endless parade of celebrities trying to look “iconic” while resembling embalmed children is getting very dull. When everything is so considered and polished - hypersexual, hyper-referential - it becomes hard to distinguish who the true, genuine characters are. Teyana Taylor aside, scrolling through celebrity content in 2026 is like being six escalators deep in a luxury shopping centre, where every shoe looks the same and I have no idea why I got a bus here in the first place.
It might be childish to admit, but I still require cultural role models to motivate me - which is why the new Aldous Harding video has carried me through this week. I love the song. It reminds me of the early 00s: Fiona Apple, Cat Power, the Beta Band, PJ Harvey - and the video would have been a hit on 120 Minutes. It is low-budget and mysterious and spiritually somewhere between Just by Radiohead and J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island. Aldous is marooned. Stuck down a metal well. Can she propeller her arms hard enough to ascend, or is she lost here forever? As I watched her dance martial-arts-style inside a big rusty bin, her head soaked with perspiration, I realised: oh yes. This is it. Everything I like and feel and have been longing for.
One of my favourite songs by Aldous is Weight of the Planets from 2019’s Designer. I especially love this video of her performing it live at the Great Escape festival.
The room would have been filled with a majority of well-meaning yet secretly horny 6 Music dads who arrived hoping for a beautiful, bee-stung-lipped Antipodean singer-songwriter performing twisted, unearthly folk music. They were not prepared for Aldous Harding to stare them dead in the eye, gurning, gritting her teeth, sometimes grinning - leaving the audience unsure whether she is about to spit, hiss or kiss. Harding has cited Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes as an influence on her unsettling choreography: a performer who fused eccentricity with a refusal to appear fragile. “She was so weird, so strange and so cute,” Aldous told the Guardian in 2019. “But she was not vulnerable.”
Maybe it’s a general frustration with the numb, frozen-faced glaze of contemporary fame, but I am increasingly drawn to any woman willing to show up with a sinister energy. I am unthreatening in temperament, yet harbour a desire to be repulsive and frightening. I know true evolution would be to want none of this: to be neither desirous nor monstrous. But for now I feel an unpleasant sense of vengeance towards younger versions of myself. I am inexplicably rattled when I witness a woman embody obedience, delicacy or timidity. Emily Blunt laughed too much at a profoundly unfunny story Matthew McConaughey told on Graham Norton, and I could barely sleep that night.
At the end of One Stop, Aldous exhales, defeated. She might still be trapped in the bin, but I know she will keep going until she is dead. While I can’t physically apply Aldous Harding’s defiant hip jutting menace in my every day life, I will keep her spirit - her creative, and courageous lack of inhibition - close to mine.
Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you.x
I love this post! I too adore Aldous Harding and how committed she is to her performance, and how few fucks she gives about weirding people out. It’s so refreshing. Probably the best show I’ve ever seen was her at Green Man in 2017 in the walled garden. Everyone was sniggering when the gurning and staring and eye-swivelling started, but after a few songs we all adjusted and the audience sort of collectively exhaled and leant in, and at the end everyone looked high and lightly traumatised and we were staring at each other knowing we’d witnessed something bizarre and magical together, and that it had been very good.