Loner

Most songs about being alone are written from inside the ache. "Loner" by Dehd is stranger and more fun than that. It arrives with a bouncing, danceable pulse, a wiry guitar and a vocal that sounds equal parts defiant and delighted, and it sets out to make solitude sound like a skill worth learning rather than a sentence to be served.

Then, the longer you stay with it, the more the song seems to argue with its own title. Beneath the swagger sits a very human wish to be near other people. That tension is the whole story, and it is why a track about wanting to be on your own has become one of the most quietly relatable songs of the band's catalog.

Where the song comes from

Dehd are a Chicago trio: Emily Kempf (bass, vocals), Jason Balla (guitar, vocals) and Eric McGrady (drums).^[1] Kempf and Balla began as a couple and built the band out of that relationship, and their 2019 album Water was shaped by the aftermath of their breakup.^[2][3] By the time they made its follow-up, Flower of Devotion, they had settled into a friendship and a working partnership, with Kempf treating the one song on the record that looks directly back at the romance as her closure.^[3]

"Loner" came out as one of the album's lead singles, ahead of a July 2020 release on Fire Talk Records.^[4] The record was written before the pandemic, but the pandemic delayed the rollout and, as Atwood Magazine noted, gave its themes of isolation a strange new weight.^[3] The band also had more time and room in the studio than usual. Kempf, who describes recording as confining, said it was the first time making a record felt fun, and the extra days let them experiment with synthesizers and a drum machine for the first time.^[1][3]

That sonic shift matters for the song. Balla has described the machine as a fourth bandmate that fills the gaps in a three-piece sound, and the band cited dreamier acts such as Broadcast, Cocteau Twins, Mazzy Star and The Jesus and Mary Chain as touchstones.^[1][3] "Loner" sits right at the meeting point of that haze and the group's scrappy, DIY garage instincts.

Learning to be alone well

The clearest statement of intent comes from Kempf herself. She has said the song grew out of a desire to get good at solitude, to become someone who does not lean on relationships or romance to feel like a whole person, and she has admitted she is not sure she fully became that person.^[1] That honesty is important. The song is not a victory lap by someone who has mastered independence. It is closer to a pep talk delivered by someone still in training.

She has also been specific about what the song is not. It is not a complaint about touring burnout or a wish to withdraw from the world. It is about not wanting her sense of self to be fused with a partner or even a very close friend.^[3] For a songwriter who spent years inside a band that doubled as a romance, that distinction carries real weight. Independence here means being able to stand up when the person you built a life around is no longer holding you.

Read this way, the song is about attachment more than isolation. The narrator is wrestling with unhealthy dependence, the kind where another person becomes the container for your identity, and she is trying out the opposite posture to see whether it fits. The bravado is part of the experiment. Saying a thing loudly is one way of finding out whether you can mean it.

Grief with a smile

Flower of Devotion as a whole is a record about grief that refuses to be solemn. Kempf has said the band wanted to stay lighthearted in the face of despair, and that it is fine to be playful during hard times.^[2] She has also described the cycle of retreating into a cave of grief and then emerging from it, with friends and loved ones as the people who help you out.^[5]

That is where "Loner" gets its double life. The arrangement is buoyant, almost celebratory, while the subject matter is the loss and dislocation that come with pulling away from people. Because the music never sinks into self-pity, the song can hold sadness and relief at the same time. It lets the listener dance through the thing that might otherwise flatten them.

The effect is a kind of emotional sleight of hand. You come for the hook and leave having rehearsed a difficult idea: that being alone and being lonely are not the same condition, and that moving from one to the other takes practice.

The desert video and the fallen angel

The music video pushes the song's contrast into visual form. It was directed by Ryan Hart and Kempf and shot in Joshua Tree and at Chicago's The Hideout.^[6] Kempf has said the initial concept was heaven versus hell, which fed the cheeky tone of the clip, and one reviewer read it as the story of a fallen angel who finds self-discovery in the desert.^[3][7]

That image fits the song well. A fallen figure cast out of a comfortable, paired-off paradise could easily be a mournful story. Placed in an open landscape and played with a wink, it becomes a story about freedom, and about how exile and liberation can be the same event viewed from different angles.

A song that argues with itself

Critics were split on how to hear it. Fire Talk's own framing treats the song as a strident declaration, a flag planted in the ground.^[8] Paste heard something close to the opposite, describing it as a song about wanting to be close to other people and being willing to admit that very human need.^[2]

Both readings hold up, and the song seems to invite them. The title is a boast, but the performance is warm and slightly frantic, the sound of someone talking herself into something. If you hear the confidence, it is a manifesto for self-sufficiency. If you hear the strain underneath, it is a confession that self-sufficiency is something she wants more than something she has.

A third reading comes from the context around it. Written before lockdowns and released into them, the song landed for many listeners as a kind of unplanned soundtrack to enforced solitude. Atwood noted that its sentiment would soon become physical isolation for Kempf and for the rest of the world.^[3] Hearing a song about choosing aloneness at a time when aloneness was mandated gave it a pointed irony that the band never planned.

Sound as argument

It is worth lingering on how much of the song's meaning lives in the sound rather than the words. A drum machine can supply a steady, almost mechanical pulse, and against that pulse the band's loose, human playing sounds even more like a person pushing against a routine. The rhythm keeps insisting on order while the voice drifts, shouts and swoops around it.

That push and pull mirrors the emotional subject. Independence in this song is not calm. It is energetic, a little anxious, and always in motion, as if standing still would let the old dependence creep back in. The band's affection for hazy, reverb-soaked pop gives it a dreamlike edge too, so the declaration never hardens into something cold.

Devotion, in more than one direction

The album's title offers another way in. Kempf has said it comes from the idea of devotion as an emotion that can be romantic or platonic.^[3] Seen from there, "Loner" is not the opposite of devotion but its complicated cousin. Wanting to be self-sufficient is partly a way of asking what devotion should cost, and of refusing a version of love that requires you to disappear into someone else.

This also explains why the song sits comfortably next to the record's more openly tender moments. A band that can write a closure song about an ended romance, hand the microphone to its drummer for a turn, and then make a track about learning to stand alone is a band thinking carefully about the many shapes closeness can take.

Why it resonates

Part of the appeal is how little the song resolves. It does not tell you that independence is easy, that togetherness is a trap, or that the cure for heartbreak is a stern self-reliance. It simply shows a person in the middle of the process, trying on a new way of being and enjoying the nerve it takes.

That honesty suits an album that critics largely received warmly. Paste called it the band's best to date, and Pitchfork gave it a Best New Music tag.^[4] "Loner" is one of the clearest windows into why: the group had found a fuller, airier sound without losing the rawness that made them appealing, and Kempf's voice carried both the bravado and the vulnerability in the same breath.

Conclusion

"Loner" works because it refuses to pick a side. It is a dance song about solitude, a declaration that doubles as a confession, and a piece of self-coaching that the listener gets to borrow. Whether you hear a band announcing their independence or a songwriter admitting how much she needs other people, you are hearing the same thing: someone learning, out loud and in real time, how to be alone without being lost.