Ora Cogan at The Abbey

Ora Cogan has been a working musician for two decades, but every so often she stops entirely – the last time, a canoe journey with friends from the Heiltsuk Nation pulled her into years of environmental justice work, then six months as a photojournalist at the Fairy Creek logging blockades, photographing for Teen Vogue, Vice and The Narwhal. Around that time her father – himself a photojournalist – died. The grief shaped 2023’s Formless, made with producer David Parry. Hard Hearted Woman, her Sacred Bones debut after years on independent labels, follows a second, quieter gap – one filled with cold-water swims and long drives through rural British Columbia.

Where Formless processed loss, the new one is about holding your ground. It’s filled with gothic country ballads, psych-folk drones and pedal steel drawn out long and slow as Cogan casts strange spells for anyone determined to stay free in a world built to hem you in.

The opening track ‘Honey’ was written in response to anti-trans legislation – not a protest song exactly, more a refusal to flinch, radiating resilience. Wrapped in warm strings, Cogan’s voice is steady, smoky, and consoling, addressing the “hard hearted woman” who anchors the record. We realise hardness here as the armour that lets something softer keep going underneath it. It’s a family trait as much as a personal one – Cogan’s mother was arrested at 1993 anti-logging protests on Vancouver Island, and her childhood home doubled as a recording studio and a meeting point for musicians and activists.

Following suit, ‘Division’ is a stark plea against the numbing cruelty that’s come to feel routine these days, while ‘The Smoke’ is groove for the end times with congas, shakers, cracked guitars, and ghostly textures colliding as Cogan sifts through the darker corners of our shared humanity. And then are the witchier tracks like ‘Bury Me’, a wonderfully eerie ode to the spirit world.

Recorded partly in Cogan’s own Nanaimo studio, the album was built with a small group of musicians – among them Kristopher Bowering of Orville Peck’s touring band – who now play these songs live too. On stage as on record, Cogan’s voice sits inside the arrangement rather than out in front of it, the songs carried by the group.

This is her second Manchester date this year, after a March show at YES. The Abbey suits her, somehow: the last building standing from the Greenheys slum clearances, relaunched this year under Now Wave after its previous life as an admirably well-meaning but ultimately doomed community hub-meets-pub. It’s a place that, like Cogan, has a complicated and fascinating story to tell.