Table of contents for Issue 77: Spring/Summer 2022 in Huck

With her devastating songs about romantic longing, the singer-songwriter has rewritten the indie rulebook, garnering a legion of dedicated fans along the way. Now, she’s speaking out against the exploitation that defines the music industry, imagining a future in which the artist is no longer a product. MITSKI MIYAWAKI IS REMINISCING about a missing person. “She was someone who simply wrote her feelings, and didn’t think about how her narrative was being conveyed,” she recalls, describing a talented 20-something who’s “long gone now”. This missing woman looked like Mitski, sounded like Mitski, and even released an album under the Japanese-American artist’s name: 2012’s Lush, a plaintive, piano-led wander through a sadness best described as biological. On songs like ‘Liquid Smooth’ and the hypnotic ‘Wife’, she sang about the kind of…

WHEN THIS PHOTO WAS TAKEN, I wasn’t long out of art school. It was 1998, I’d graduated the year before. I was flipping between London and Brighton, visiting Paris a lot, partying quite a bit and taking pictures of my friends. In that sense, magazines were a logical conclusion for me. I didn’t want to go and photograph for the Sunday Times or anything like that. I was interested in style mags - like The Face and i-D. I approached Sleazenation magazine straight away. A guy called Steve Lazarides, who was Picture Editor there, gave me a bag of film and, based on the pictures I showed him, said “Go and make pictures of these parties for us.” So I just went off, and that was the beginning of a…

SITTING ON THE RIVER LEA, next to the historic Essex-Middlesex border in Northeast London, is Walthamstow Wetlands – a 211-hectare reservoir site and one of Europe’s largest urban wetlands. It’s a haven for wildlife, from grey herons, kingfishers and peregrine falcons to speckled wood butterflies and thick-kneed beetles. It opened to the public in 2017, and it’s no coincidence that residents of the sleek new high-rise towers in nearby Tottenham Hale and Blackhorse Road – developments with snappy names like Blackhorse Mills and Hale Works – can enjoy views of it from their balconies and rooftop gardens. The main entrance on Forest Road is just a three-minute drive from where an unarmed Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police on 4 August, 2011, and exactly a mile away from…

FROM TOWER BRIDGE TO THE SHARD, London hosts a wealth of world-famous architecture. But while much has been written about these grandiose designs, the buildings that sit in their shadows are rarely celebrated. By celebrating an overlooked area of British architecture, this is where Jack Young’s new book, The Council House, attempts to draw our attention. The book, which comprises photos of 68 council estates across the capital, along with historical details and conversations with residents, shows why these often-maligned buildings remain integral to the city’s identity. “Council houses make up London’s architectural DNA just like places like Buckingham Palace and Big Ben,” says Young. “It’s all London. And these buildings also have architectural clout and history.” Seen through Young’s lens, buildings that may initially seem mundane become strange and…

The result is a brand new chapter for Hackney Bumps, a concrete haven in the heart of East London, where skateboarding is just the beginning. WHAT’S BETTER THAN THIS? It’s a summer night and you’re 15 years old. You’re playing spin the bottle with your friends at Hackney Bumps, a skate park made of undulating concrete that looks like a lunar landscape, stretching out into the darkness. The bottle lands on your crush, and your mate says she should kiss you. You give them a panicked look, but the girl says, “Fuck it, why not?” The person telling me this story is Elijah McKenzie, who’s 16 now, goes by the name Moss, and uses he/they pronouns. We’re talking about what Bumps - a decades-old BMX spot, originally, that was given…

I just finished an exciting period of work and now I’m struggling with a comedown of sorts. Have you ever experienced similar feelings - finishing a tour for example - and if so, how did you overcome them? - Hannah I’ve definitely experienced sadness in these moments. I think the way to push past it is just to realise that when you experience some kind of high, it can also be exhausting. There’s nothing wrong with having a period of relative calm: you don’t have to always be turned up to 10. Now is your time to do all the simple things you like doing - whether it’s playing video games, watching movies, seeing friends, whatever. I like to demo songs and mess around with them. For me, it’s about…

In Gaza, a group of young Palestinians have found temporary freedom in the act of parkour, reimagining wreckage and ruins as a series of high-octane playgrounds. The fearless collective see freerunning as a way of taking their immediate environment to its absolute limits - and, in the process, claiming a part of it back. YOUNG PALESTINIANS ARE JUMPING ACROSS the wreckage of the al-Jalaa tower, an 11-storey building in Gaza once home to the Associated Press and Al Jazeera television, as well as 60 residential homes. Dozens of the group, many of them just teenagers, scale the debris. Bounding from ruin to ruin, they perform daunting tricks at stomach-churning heights. Running across rooftops, they leap and swing off the exposed scaffolding, before tumbling onto the sand floor below These images…

“YOU’VE GOT TO LOSE SOMETIMES" chanted Sharon Van Etten on 2012’s ‘Magic Chords’, a back-against-the-wall confessional that found surprising hope in the idea of reaching rock bottom. Like so many of the New Jersey singer-songwriter’s best songs - see also: ‘Every Time The Sun Comes Up’ and ‘We Are Fine’ - it’s an embrace in musical form, serving as a guiding light to the lost and offering up a hypnotic gumbo of folk, rock, pop, and electronica. “When people hear my music, I want them to feel embraced by the idea that it is okay to be vulnerable," says the 41-year-old musician, speaking on an early morning phone call. Today, her voice - just like the one we hear in her songs - is the perfect blend of honeyed and…