The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.
Pure Hex is an East Bay-based “shoegaze-adjacent alternative rock band” prepping for the release of the first half of their double LP in May. Shoegaze is a subgenre of indie and alternative rock that incorporates mixing obscure vocals, feedback and distorted effects with high volume.
“We’re somewhere in that realm of kind of heavy, dreamy, send-you-on-a-trip music,” vocalist Marta Alvarez says. She describes their music as having ambience, distortion and heaviness while also having a “dreamy quality.” The band members used to be in a project called Stranger together, and they asked her to join later.
Regarding “Fray,” Alvarez says the song is about the point in her and her friend’s mid- to late-20s when they are trying to figure out what they are doing. While the lyrics have some darker elements, she says they also reflect the reality of being alive and acknowledge the duality of good and bad times in life.
“They’re figuring out if the things that they’ve been doing are leading them in the way that they want to go,” she says. “They’re figuring out how they deal with change, and by they, I mean me as well. All of us are, are kind of navigating this point in our lives.”