hex gf

”It’s a real long walk, but a short run,” Justine Bowe sings on hex gf’s first single, “Knife”. She might be talking about the swift, easy birth of the band’s breezy, winking EP, or the long journey she and bandmate Sam Lee took to get there.

Lee and Bowe met as members of @MagicMan, the synthpop wunderkinds who landed a major label deal with a few free songs on Bandcamp. But after the band's quick rise, the expectations became suffocating, always chasing the next pop hit with a soaring hook. The band broke up, and Lee and Bowe — who’d started dating — broke up too.

It took a couple years for Lee and Bowe to get back to a place where they wanted to play music together again. (Time enough for Bowe to write a song about Lee called “My Mistake” and chuck his favorite Bruce album from her moving car.) By then, as Bowe puts it, Lee needed “music rehab”. He found it playing bass as a hired gun in her band, @Photocomfort. And then, slowly, they started writing again — and when the pandemic hit, they locked themselves in Lee’s empty house and wrote “Knife”.

Lee and Bowe met playing music together, dated playing music together, and broke up — and yet somehow, here they are, best friends and still playing music together. hex gf’s songs feel warm, lived-in, and revelatory. Bowe’s lyrics sometimes seem caught on a feeling between laughing and crying—or maybe it’s just that they sound like both? “Now that we’re grown, what do you see in me?” she sings, and Lee’s guitar answers back.