Singer Julie Hough: ‘Our teacher told us – “women hardly ever get pregnant from rape.” Ergo, it is not really that important’

It is not difficult to hear that reaction when you put on Levelling, the brilliant new album by her band HAVVK. It sounds ethereal and heavy, delicate and violent all at the same time – as if Sleater Kinney, St Vincent, Cocteau Twins and Thom Yorke of Radiohead are competing for attention, locked inside lead singer Julie’s head for eternity.

The song she is most proud of on the album is ‘Automatic’. “It’s a love song about friendships and some of the most important women in my life,” she says. “It made me so happy from the minute we started recording it. I felt like I was in the band that 15-year-old me always wanted to be in…”

She remembers a teacher telling her religion class that abortion under any circumstances was wrong. Someone asked, “what if a woman is raped?”

“The teacher brushed it off,” she recalls. “She told us: ‘women hardly ever get pregnant from rape.’ Ergo, it is not really that important. I took what the teacher said that day at face value.”

Eight years later, having moved to London to further her ambitions as a singer and writer, she started researching what was happening back home. She was angry at how restrictive Ireland’s reproductive laws were. She had friends in London who had gone through legal abortions. “It was tough, but it was not that unusual versus what I had learned in Ireland.”

She realised the power that the government and religious leaders had over women and their bodies in Ireland. “I was learning about the situation but very much from an outsider’s perspective. I was realising as someone who lived in London that I was so privileged, and I had been quite blind to what was happening in Ireland. I was dealing with the shock of that. It was like, ‘This is what my sisters are going through.’ I was really angry.”

All that anger went into the song ‘Once Told’ with indie-punk band HAVVK (pronounced hawk), which she had formed with producer Matthew Harris on guitar, Chris Handsley on bass, and Sam Campbell on drums. In April 2015, she wrote most of the lyrics over two hours in a park in Homerton. “My sister will save me/The mother who made me,” were the lines she scribbled down on a notepad. It became the first political song she had written in HAVVK.

“It was empowering,” says Hough, who studied English and classics at National University of Ireland, Galway. They  played ‘Once Told’ for the first time at Birthdays in Dalston, London, in September 2015. In April 2016, the song was released on the band’s self-titled debut EP on their own label Veta.

A few months later, they played a gig for Repeal the Eighth Dublin. “Everyone had been sharing stories and speeches and poetry, and it was all extremely poignant,” she says. “Then we came on. That was the most powerful time we played ‘Once Told’. I can remember really feeling like part of something bigger as we played it. Now when we play it, I’m sent right back to that room. Because there’s always going to be someone in the room who’s been impacted by the issue.”

In 2017, the band moved to Berlin and released the ‘She Knows’ EP. One track, ‘Ghosts’, Hough explains: “is about the way expectations around femininity and the role of women are internalised and become ways of feeling validated.”

And ‘Take It Away’ from the same EP? “This is about my friend being followed one night and the measures that women have to take to stay safe.”

The single ‘Glass’, which was released in 2018, was a reaction to the success of the Repeal referendum. “The lyrics to that song are about the power of words to unveil hypocrisy and unite people under a shared cause,” she says. “It’s inspired not just by the powerful slogans repeated at marches but importantly, about the conversations that were happening behind closed doors around that time, difficult conversations with families, friends and neighbours.”

In late 2018 and early 2019, HAVVK began work on their debut album with Rocky O’Reilly in Belfast. They were also touring from their base in Berlin. Around this time, the band became a three-piece when Chris Handsley left and Julie took up the bass. In the winter of 2019, they moved back to Dublin and released the Cause and Effect album.

Just before lockdown last spring, Julie and Matt finished Levelling. “The new album is more about personal topics and mental health, rather than wider social/political ones,” she says. “But it does touch on the idea of using your voice to do better. ‘Under Your Breath’ is all about when you’re faced with the opportunity to speak up about something. It’s about living with the knowledge that you could have said something but didn’t and challenging yourself to do better next time.”

How does she feel now about the lyrics to ‘Once Told’ – “A walk in the garden/We’ll plant you a pardon/To soldier your disgrace/The long ride in this race…”

“I actually feel really proud reading those lines now,” she says. “There’s so much internalised shame around the topic. It’s embarrassing to think a lot of my generation went through secondary school not really lashing back at the doctrine we were being fed. So, I’m proud that I processed that and was able to channel it into something that people could share in.”

‘Levelling’ by HAVVK is out now on Veta Music. The band will play at The Workman’s Club in Dublin on Wednesday, September 29, with support from A Ritual Sea.