Ora Cogan – Hard Hearted Woman
Spirits dance throughout Ora Cogan’s music. Shades of the oppressed and dispossessed, of those lovelorn or beset by other demons. Cogan channels them into a musical maelstrom on Hard Hearted Woman, her third album and first for Sacred Bones. She gathers nominally disparate genres (folk, country, soul, psychedelia, goth-tinged dream pop) and makes them natural bedfellows. There are traces of specific artists who’ve made similarly incantatory music (a dash of Angel Olsen; even more of Grouper and Vashti Bunyan), but Cogan’s sound is distinctly her own. On Woman, it’s often a sound of great beauty, equally capable of evoking sadness and joy, fear and defiance.
As documented in a recent interview for this website, Cogan began Hard Hearted Woman from a place of grief—almost a desire to put up walls in response to recent losses—and completed it in a brighter, more open spirit. “Love You Better” epitomizes the places where these feelings overlap: Over a warm, backbeat-forward classic country-rock arrangement, Cogan beseeches a stubborn could-be love to crack open their shell: “You can’t take it all on/Moving against the grain/Oh sleepless, the moon in her theatre/Calls your name to the stage.” It acknowledges the depth of pain but surrounds it with light and rhythm—hence we get dancing spirits as the steel guitar lines grow more intricate and mandolin fills the margins. Producer David Parry and collaborators like multi-instrumentalist Tom Deis, viola/violin player Ester Thunander, and others similarly drape the album’s other songs in a rich fog of instrumentation that always empower Cogan’s haunted soprano and never overpower it.
Nominally, many of these songs could be about lost or difficult-to-grasp love—“Division,” “Limits,” and “River Rise,” to name a few examples. And you can hear them as such and take cathartic comfort in that. Alternatively, you can hear a line like “Please, don’t listen/Don’t give in to division” as a call to a greater human unity (similar to Converge’s recent “Divide and Destroy” in that sense, if not any other). The goth/post-punk-sounding track also acknowledges our need for constant stimuli (sound, visuals, lights in the house, heat) and asks if indeed we fucking actually need them to “feel more alive?” A difficult question for anyone to pose or attempt answering in 2026, to be sure.
Hard Hearted Woman, so named for a line in its opener “Honey,” is not an explicitly polemic political record. Yet that song, by Cogan’s telling, is a direct response to waves of anti-trans legislation throughout North America, standing in solidarity with those whom too many powerful men would see eradicated. (I found the lyric “Silk stocking run/Made it through the night/Fixing your armour/Fixing your smile” intensely relatable.) And it’s impossible to hear the dream-pop-folk hybrid “Believe in the Devil,” with lyrics like “Lately it feels like everybody’s doing time” and “Please don’t bend the world to your will/Because it’s right for you” without connecting them to our daily realities. But you don’t have to hear the songs through that filter to find them fulfilling.
The record does not attempt to grab you by the throat. It certainly contains hooks, but the songs take their time to stack layers of sound (consider how long it is before “Honey” grows to its full sonic richness). This sometimes feels as if the songs are backloaded. Some might find this difficult; most should understand it as a mark of fulfilling art. “You make me feel more alive,” Cogan sings over the warm electric strum and pluck of closer “Too Late.” “You make me feel like we’re going to survive.” That duality again. Whether it’s in reference to a lover or a community or both, it’s the sort of unvarnished uplift we need.
Label: Sacred Bones
Year: 2026
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Ora Cogan : Hard Hearted Woman
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