Erika Hartgrove doesn’t write songs so much as declarations. “Wild Abandoning” is the latest one, and it arrives under her own label, Primordial Vibrations, which she founded this year to put out music with zero compromise attached. That’s not a tagline she’s borrowing. It’s the actual structure of how this record exists in the world. She owns it. She runs it. Nobody signed off on the parts that might’ve made a label nervous.
The song sits inside her usual toolkit. Organic instrumentation, 432 Hz tuning, vocals left unfiltered rather than smoothed into something safer. Some artists treat those choices as aesthetic flourishes. Hartgrove treats them like a position. Tuning the whole thing to 432 instead of the industry standard 440 is a quiet argument about what music is even supposed to do to a body, and she’s clearly made her decision on that a long time ago. You don’t build a label around “sovereign self-determination” by accident.
What the song is actually saying
Strip away the framing and “Wild Abandoning” is about one thing. Not resisting the tide. Life keeps moving whether you brace against it or not, and the song’s stance, going by how Hartgrove and early coverage have described it, is that freedom looks less like control and more like trust. Not recklessness. She’s been explicit that this isn’t about throwing caution out the window. It’s closer to knowing where you’re headed and letting the current do some of the work.
That’s a harder thing to write honestly than it sounds. Plenty of songs claim liberation as a mood. Fewer commit to it as an operating philosophy, which is what happens when the same person writing the lyrics also owns the masters and runs the label putting it out. There’s no gap between the message and the business model here. That alignment is rare enough to be worth pointing out on its own.
A flagship artist running her own label
Founding Primordial Vibrations wasn’t a side move. Hartgrove built it specifically to publish work she describes as boundary pushing and rooted in spiritual alignment, and she’s positioning it as a home for other artists chasing the same kind of ownership. Ambitious, sure. But she’s not asking anyone to take that on faith. She’s the first act on the roster, which means “Wild Abandoning” doubles as a kind of proof of concept. If the label’s whole pitch is artistic sovereignty, the flagship release better hold up to that standard, and she seems to know it.
Whether this becomes a real ecosystem of independent, master-owning artists or stays a one-woman project is the actual story to watch here. Either way, “Wild Abandoning” is where it starts, and you can hear where she’s headed for yourself over on Spotify.
In collaboration with One Submit – Music promotion and a lyric video maker