Katie Richardson – aka Hex Hue – has carved out a niche as one of Northern Ireland’s most exciting up-and-coming alt-pop acts. Making sure her message always hits home, she writes candidly, and has a knack for an earworm.

‘Aquiver’ distils this approach down to a sublime alt-pop gem. The track is a slick offering, co-produced by Ryan McGroarty of Beauty Sleep.

“It’s a song about getting lost in your head,” Richardson says. “It’s about overthinking and being vulnerable and finding your feet and grounding in a new relationship. It's about the fear of losing part of yourself as you hurtle into unknown waters and how corrosive new love can be.

"I started writing it when I was falling in love with someone and we had our first fight – we were drunk outside a hospital! – so it was passionate and terrifying and dramatic. The excitement of someone letting you in, mixed with the terror of the intensity of those feelings and being hurt was really overwhelming.

“I think I spent the whole first year of our relationship feeling incredibly stressed about something going wrong. The song acted as a release for me from the intensity of that situation. As songs and music often do, I was pushing myself to wade out into those feelings in the hope that one day I would feel more calm and less insecure and shaky. I feel like most of the music I'm writing these days is mainly to act as a release from reality while dealing with some quite real situations in the lyrics.”

Listen to the track below.