In an era when tenderness feels like rebellion, Ora Cogan’s Hard Hearted Woman arrives like a spell whispered over seawater and smoke. Her Sacred Bones debut (following the shape-shifting Formless in 2023) is a ten-track masterclass in emotional alchemy: haunted folk, psych-rock drift, and shadowy country braided into something luminous and unbreakable. Recorded between her Nanaimo studio, David Parry’s Dream Club in Victoria, and remote sessions with Tom Deis, the album was forged in cold river plunges, late-night political reckonings, and long drives through British Columbia’s Lillooet wilderness. The result glows—intimate yet vast, carved equally with grief and wicked wit.

It opens with “Honey,” a slow-burning invocation built on warm strings and loose, locomotive percussion. Cogan’s voice—steady, smoky, consoling—delivers the album’s central image: “Just a hard-hearted woman / Gunmetal smile.” Written in direct response to anti-trans legislation, the track radiates resilience without ever hardening into bitterness. It sets the tone perfectly: hardness here is not cruelty but the necessary shell that lets the softest parts survive.

“The Smoke” shifts into hypnotic groove territory, nodding to JJ Cale while dismantling the form with congas, shakers, cracked guitars, and ghostly textures. It’s a late-night end-times boogie that stares into humanity’s darker corners and still finds room to dance. “Division,” the second single, stretches across a stark, reverberant landscape before flaring into something almost prog-rock in its dramatic build—a raw plea against the numbing cruelty that’s become routine. Elsewhere, “River Rise” and “Bury Me” channel the album’s natural-world origins, turning landscape into liturgy, while “Believe in the Devil” and “Too Late” lean into the jewel-toned demons that share the stage with its angels.

Cogan never lets the record collapse into sermon or slogan. Instead, she offers devotion to mystery itself: the strange power of staying open when the world keeps slamming shut. Hard Hearted Woman isn’t about closing off; it’s about the armor we grow so our breakable hearts can keep beating. In ten shimmering vignettes, Cogan reminds us that the most radical act left is simply refusing to let the hardness win.

A record this tender and fierce doesn’t come along often. If you need proof that beauty and resistance can still share the same breath, press play. You’ll emerge steadier, smokier, and—yes—harder-hearted in all the right ways.