The industrial-pop single came together at Sound Ninja Collective with a one-take guitar solo, doubled vocals and a last-minute tweak to the cymbals.
Strascha has released Hack, an industrial-pop single that pushes into pop rock with a guitar solo recorded in one take. On the tram to the Sofia songwriting camp where she wrote it, she was still weighing up whether to cancel. An important friendship had ended, and she was already overextended.
Once she got to Sound Ninja Collective, Strascha knew what she wanted the track to sound like. Producer Isaak Enchev quickly shaped that idea, while guitarist Alexander Hristov, whom she met that day, recorded the climactic solo on his first pass. Strascha laid down the lead vocal in one take before adding doubles. Within six hours, the track was essentially finished.
The final adjustment came from mix engineer Dimitar Ganchev, who dropped by the studio. He suggested using the cymbals to add more noise to the low end. The track was already loud, which made the idea appear counterintuitive to Strascha, but she heard the difference as soon as they tried it.
Her artist name comes from strah, the Bulgarian word for fear. She says:
Strascha is basically my way of making friends with fear instead of running away from it.
The session she nearly skipped gave her one of her favourite songs.