Ora Cogan

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Ora Cogan announces new album 'Hard Hearted Woman' out March 13th via Sacred Bones Records and shares the new single/video "Honey". UK tour dates announced.

Ora Cogan announces her new album and Sacred Bones debut, Hard Hearted Woman, out March 13th, and releases the lead single/video, “Honey.”

Ora Cogan’s music is alchemical: part instinct, part ritual, and always conjured from the edges where life feels sharpest. With Hard Hearted Woman, she mixes haunted folk, psych rock, and a shadowy strain of country, building a realm where catharsis feels lush, mysterious and vital.

Shaken by the tenor of modern life, Cogan pulled in a circle of kindred musicians and made a record shaped by someone who has looked into the abyss and decided, again and again, to choose curiosity.

The album opens with today's single, “Honey,” a slow-blooming burn built on warm strings and loose, driving percussion. Cogan’s voice is steady, smoky, and consoling, addressing the “hard hearted woman” who anchors the record.

"Honey"radiates resilience without ever losing its tenderness as Cogan sings: “Just a hard-hearted woman // Gunmetal smile // Guarding your heart // Guarding your style.”

Watch the Paloma Ruiz-Hernandez-directed video featuring Cogan bewitching friends, lovers, and foes, into a whirlwind of dance and chaotic joy. Ruiz-Hernandez comments,

“The idea was to enter into an existence of absurdity where everyone is simultaneously isolated in their own loneliness and drowning in collective longing and lust.”

Raised on an island in the Salish Sea, Cogan had a bohemian upbringing in a home steeped in music, art, and philosophical debate — her father a photojournalist, her mother a musician and studio co-owner — shaping her early immersion in traditional folk and outsider music. Cogan left home to apprentice as a silversmith at the age of 15, soon taking on a kaleidoscopic array of jobs while touring through Europe and the US, fully immersing herself in underground music of all varieties.

She was anchored in Vancouver’s noise and experimental scene, and taught herself to play fiddle, toured in a drone-folk duo, and collaborated with a multitude of artists, never settling into one sound or scene. A canoe journey with friends from the Heiltsuk Nation led her to walking away from music for a while, dedicating years to environmental justice followed by human rights focused photojournalism.

After her father’s death, Cogan moved to Twin Peaks-like Nanaimo, B.C., drawn to its remote landscapes and eclectic music community. She started building a studio and collaborating with local musicians including Finn Smith, Nancy Pittet, Kristopher Bowering (Orville Peck), who now form her band. Following 2023’s Formless, she spent a winter crafting new songs that became Hard Hearted Woman.

Hard Hearted Woman grew out of a blur of cold-water plunges, long river swims, late-night ruminations with friends on art and politics, and long drives through the rural Lillooet landscape to visit her godmother. Alongside her band and guests from both the country and experimental worlds, she recorded with David Parry (Loving) at Dream Club in Victoria, B.C., as well as in her studio in Nanaimo, and remotely with Tom Deis.

The result is a record that glows like something pulled from smoke and seawater — intimate, shimmering, and carved with wit as much as grief. It’s a swirling, jewel-toned ode to all the angels and the demons.

A work of devotion to mystery, to community, and to the strange power of making art in a fractured world, Hard Hearted Woman is a record about hardness and resilience; it’s the shell we grow so our most human, breakable selves can survive. Hard Hearted Woman is for anyone trying to stay open, even when the world makes that feel impossible.

Photo by Alexa Black

Tour dates

March 13 - Vancouver, BC @ The Pearl (Album Release Show)

March 19 - Brighton, UK @ The Hope & Ruin

March 20 - Oxford, UK @ The Nest

March 21 - Manchester, UK @ Yes Pink Room

March 22 - Newcastle, UK @ The Lubber Fiend

March 24 - Edinburgh, UK @ Sneaky Pete's

March 25 - Glasgow, UK @ Room 2

March 27 - Galway, IE @ Roisin Dubh

March 28 - Dublin, IE @ Whelans

March 29 - Cork, IE @ Wavelength at Cyprus Avenue