PURGER

About this Song

There is the purger - the one who lets shame win and can’t keep anything good down. And there is the PURGER - the one who rids that self destructive version. The PURGER grieves who they once were but chooses to survive. Lydia May has lived both. This single is the moment between them. PURGER sounds exactly like its title: bold, layered, dynamic, in motion. Big drums and anthemic guitars build toward something inevitable, the defiance of Wolf Alice colliding with the dramatic depth of Florence and the Machine. It ends in just vocals - a bedroom harmony choir she wrote and produced entirely herself. The sound of being called back to the thing that is destroying you, the desperate familiar pull of pain that once felt like home, and the unavoidable realisation, finally, that you cannot go back. Trained at the BRIT School, Lydia’s vocal carries the intimacy of Billie Eilish at her most confessional and the powerhouse gall of someone who has nothing left to hide. Opening with the line "most days I don't want to be here", PURGER draws from her lived experience of an eating disorder, insomnia, and the painful, non-linear process of choosing to let go of a version of herself that was destroying her. When she was struggling deep in her own purger disorder it wasn't just food she couldn't keep down, it was any thought of pleasure or self kindness. The song is where she put that version of herself to rest.