A witch hunt begins with a story that a community tells about one of its own. Somebody becomes the reason things have gone wrong, and once that idea takes hold, the accusation does the rest. No evidence is needed, because the verdict was reached long before anyone stood in a room to argue. Amaya reaches for this image in ‘Exile‘, the new single from Amaya and the Echoes, out now. It is the oldest picture we have of being judged unfairly. The witch is a person a crowd decided to see wrongly.
Purgatory is quieter and, to my mind, crueller. It holds no fire and offers no ending, only waiting. You are neither inside nor fully cast away, and nobody tells you how long it will last. Anyone who has lived with a door that will not open, or a question about where they belong that never receives an answer, will recognise the place.
Martyrdom turns the other two around. The martyr is pushed out like the witch and suffers like the soul in purgatory, but the martyr refuses to let the suffering be the last word. Persecution meets a self that will not bend. Of the three images, this is the one that answers back.
Why go back to these old pictures to talk about now? Amaya wrote ‘Exile’ in response to what she has seen happening around the world. She points to political division and the abuse of power, and to people left rejected, judged unfairly and unheard. Those conditions are modern, but they wear old clothes.
She is straight forward about her aim. “As I wrote the song, I wanted to draw attention to people and communities around the world who are excluded, displaced or turned away, and whose stories remain unseen and unheard.” The last part of that sentence is where the old symbols earn their place. The accused woman, the waiting soul and the martyr have always existed in stories other people told about them. Amaya is drawn to them because they are the archetypes of those whose own accounts went unrecorded.
She also makes a point about what exile takes from people. It separates them from their homes and from the communities around them. Then it reaches further and loosens their hold on who they are. That is the real damage in her telling. Losing a place can be survived. Losing the self that belonged there is harder.
This is where the song’s defiance comes in, and I find it moving. Against that slow erosion, ‘Exile’ holds on to the plain fact of remaining. Its stubbornness is not a grand rebellion. It is a person who has been judged, held in limbo and pushed to the margins, and who still insists on being counted and declines to disappear. The martyr’s refusal, brought down to human scale, becomes something anyone might manage on a bad day.
Amaya and the Echoes are a London band who call their sound orchestral dark pop, and gothic imagery sits naturally in that world, and it would be easy to wear it as costume. Here it carries weight. She wanted the song to capture the frustration of being pushed aside, and the determination to say I’m still here.
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