By the third month, the pace has already started to show. “Break My Heart Again,” out March 31, is the latest piece in Domi Hawken’s 12 Songs, 12 Months project, a self-imposed schedule that leaves little room for overthinking and even less for delay.
The London-based indie rock / pop artist set up the series around a simple idea: stop waiting. The songs were already there in notebooks, voice memos and half-finished demos, with lyrics done and arrangements mapped out, but the logic of holding back had started to feel pointless. “Honestly, we’re not there, we may never be, no one is waiting, so why are we?” she says. The answer was to release one original track every month throughout 2026 and let the work speak in real time.
That structure gives Hawken something to aim at, but it also turns every month into a deadline loop. She describes trying to build an audience as “playing a game nobody explained the rules to,” with the usual questions hanging over it: how do you find listeners, what are you missing, what should you be doing that you aren’t already doing. The monthly cycle solves one problem by replacing it with another. “There’s always something to do,” she says, and because everyone involved is also balancing “actual grown up jobs,” there is no real downtime.
The songs were not finished in advance either. Some were written, but each release is being recorded from the ground up, which means the scramble is built into the format. Hawken says the masters for the first two singles came back just two days before release. “Mad scramble.”
“Break My Heart Again” apparently needed more work than most. Hawken describes it as a song that “went through more hands and more versions than most before it finally felt right,” which says as much about the setup as it does about the track itself. Domi Hawken may be the name on the front, but she is clear that this is a group effort rather than a solo exercise held together by force of personality.
The team around her includes Matty, Kobi, Cyprien and Stephen, with Dominique Gabrielle Hawken writing the song and handling vocals and electric guitar alongside Adrian Edeline. Cyprien Jacquet plays bass and drums and also produced the single. Executive production comes from Matthew Robson and Kobi Pham, who also handled mixing, while Stephen Kerrison took care of mastering.
The wider project moves across indie rock, blues, folk and alternative pop, with Hawken describing the songs as guitar-led and emotionally direct, sometimes leaning toward heavier riffs, elsewhere pulling back into something closer to stripped-down heartbreak. The point is not consistency in style so much as consistency in release. One song every month. Keep showing up. “Give people twelve chances to find something that lands for them,” she says. “Didn’t connect with the last one? Here’s another. And another. Keep showing up — until something hits.”
That same month-to-month thinking has spilled over into the visual side too. Hawken says she had not really accounted for the fact that twelve releases also means twelve sleeves, and she had no interest in filling the year with variations on the same self-portrait. For “Stalling,” she ended up using a photo of a piece of paper she had scribbled on with her one-year-old niece, with the title written across the top. It is a small detail, but it fits the way this whole project seems to work: use what is there, make a decision, move on to the next thing.
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Hawken has been building her live presence around the release schedule as well, with shows at Dash the Henge and The Old Dispensary already behind her, and availability for headline, support and showcase dates from May 2026. Online, she is active on Instagram and Spotify, where the monthly run is gradually taking shape in public.
Three songs in, nine left to go. “I don’t know what will happen with it. I don’t know what’s to come over the rest of the year. All I know is we will keep writing, recording and releasing. We’re not waiting for permission anymore.”
