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Jul 22, 2026 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Marina Paiz

LA-based indie singer/songwriter Adjenai makes airy, moving, and thoughtful indie pop, crafting an outlet for both glimmering melodies and plaintive personal confession. Their forthcoming debut album, Did It Hurt? Was It Fun? began first as a therapeutic exercise rather than a full-length record, written as Adjenai was in the midst of an extended hiatus from releasing new music while caretaking for a family member with dementia.

“I was writing songs to process my feelings,” Adjenai explains. “It wasn’t until I was walking with my mom after we spread my aunt’s ashes in Alaska that I said, ‘I think I need to try again with my artist project. I think these songs might be for someone else to hear.’”

The full album is out on October 23rd, but today Adjenai is sharing an early listen to the album’s lead single, “Early Mourning.”

“Early Mourning” is a lithe, infectious, and devastatingly pretty effort, driven by both pillowy synth tones and understated guitar layers. It feels like a true insular bedroom pop production, but Adjenai also shows off a remarkable melodic sensibility, delivering a cathartic, instantly catchy chorus and ascendant bridge. Yet, just when the song feels ready to let all of its built-up tension loose for a starry final chorus, Adjenai pushes against pop songwriting convention and pulls back for a quiet, piano-backed outro that never quite resolves.

The track’s lyrics sort through the conflicting realities of grieving someone who you are still caring for on a daily basis, trapped in an exhausting, interminable limbo. While much of the track brims with barely contained restlessness and sticky pop hooks, the quiet turn in its final moments lets the loss rise to the forefront, reframing the chorus from an expression of frustration to one of reality-shifting grief. “I don’t want to talk about you anymore / But everything got too quiet / My ears were ringing in the silence / I didn’t want to feel it anymore / I’d pay to take us back to right before this.”

Adjenai says of the track, “‘Early Mourning’ is a song about loss. Specifically, it’s about losing a loved one to Alzheimer’s and the slow-release pain of missing someone who was still physically there. During this time, I was wading through the bargaining stage of grief. I was making deals with myself just to get from one day to the next, wishing for more time or less time or for all of it to just be over. Because I was caretaking, all of these heightened emotions had to be contained, and I wanted the production to reflect that somehow. I wanted the song to feel locked into a light, shimmering arrangement. Similar to the bargaining stage, this song really only scratches the surface of loss. It’s not an expression of the full spectrum grief. It’s just the beginning of the acknowledgement.

I wrote ‘Early Mourning’ sitting on the living room floor in a house I’d never been to before, in a state that my family wasn’t from. I was out of place and emotionally fried for all 5 months I spent there. It was exhausting and writing music was the only thing that made me feel like myself. Watching someone lose themselves really made me cling to the parts of me that felt like core traits. So, I bought myself a guitar with money I definitely should have been saving to keep paying rent on my apartment in LA. I started demoing just to send the ideas over to my partner. That led to long-distance pre-production. When our schedules overlapped, I’d record in the bedroom closet. From there, the production process stayed at home. When I moved back to LA, we recorded in our bedroom/studio and really took our time tinkering with the bouncy melancholy feeling I was going for.

This song is wrapped up in complicated emotions for me now. I still get sad hearing it, playing it, and performing it. But also, I get to experience that thread of connection to someone who’s gone now. I get dropped right back into the muggy Florida summer where everything was terrible, but at least she was still in the room with us. I get to go back in time for a little bit.”

Check out the song below. Did It Hurt? Was It Fun? Is out everywhere on October 23rd.