Premiere: Haux Shares New Track “Hazel”
New Album Blue Angeles Is Out March 8th via Ultra Records
Mar 07, 2024
Photography by Sayer Mansfield
Tomorrow, singer/songwriter Woodson Black is back with Blue Angeles, his sophomore record under the moniker Haux. Black debuted in 2016 with his EP, All We’ve Known, and released his first full-length album, Violence in a Quiet Mind, in 2020. Blue Angeles finds him pairing with producers Thomas Bartlett (Taylor Swift, Florence + The Machine, Sufjan Stevens), Maxwell Byrne (Mallrat), and Aug E. Rose, exploring immersive and layered soundscapes and cultivating lyrical meditations on themes like addiction and spirituality.
As Black describes, “This album is about beginning… It’s saying you gotta start somewhere and here’s as good a place as any. I think sometimes in this Hollywood life we live now, in our pursuit of looking good all the time we forget what it means to actually feel good. We distract ourselves with social media, shopping, worrying about the world, to-do lists–you name it, I’ve done it. This album documents the distraction, the slow process of waking up to my life and finally remembering how to feel like myself again. Blue Angeles is a reminder to all that everyday is a beautiful place to begin.”
Today, ahead of the album’s full release, Black is sharing an early listen to the record’s closing track, “Hazel,” along with an accompanying video, premiering with Under the Radar.
With “Hazel” Haux pulls back from the record’s vibrant early singles, inhabiting a soft and spectral instrumental palette that never rises above an intimate whisper. The track is largely guided by an ever-present acoustic chord progression, shaded in gentle hues by piano accents and the barest hint of percussion. In this stripped-back setting, Black’s voice shines with a startingly intimacy, filling the track with airy harmonies and glassy beauty as he details a deeply personal search for peace: “Boy I miss Hazel / I’m sorry I put you through hell / So tell them you love them / And try to forgive yourself.”
Black says of the track, “‘Hazel’ is pretty much the story of this album, written in three parts over the course of three years, elapsing a grand total of three minutes. It’s like my own personal walk for (inner) peace and a place to give thanks for this season of my life. It’s a story I wrote over time, so as the verses change, my point of view changes and by the end I am anew. I am the old me and the new me at the same time, in the same song. I didn’t plan for it to happen this way but it turned out to be a cool curtain closer moment for the record.”
Check out the song and video below. Blue Angeles is out March 8th via Ultra Records.
