B-Side Guys

Medical waiting rooms possess their own temporal physics—time both stops and accelerates, creating liminal space where ordinary identity categories cease to function. HERÁ’s debut single “Before And After Tragedy,” released twenty-seven days ago, transforms this specific form of suspended animation into artistic statement about how catastrophic diagnosis reshapes not just health but fundamental understanding of selfhood.

The track opens with environmental immediacy that bypasses abstract emotional description in favor of specific physical experience: “I’m in this waiting room,/feeling like the space is surrounded by my impending doom.” This locational precision grounds the entire composition in actual place rather than metaphorical landscape, creating foundation for exploration that feels genuinely documentary rather than merely confessional.

HERÁ’s multicultural musical training—Indian classical, jazz, R&B influences channeled through BIMM University London education—manifests through her approach to the central question of identity disruption. The repeated uncertainty “I don’t know who I’d be before tragedy” captures something beyond typical illness narrative by focusing on temporal confusion rather than simple suffering. This perspective reveals mature understanding that serious illness doesn’t just change the future but retroactively alters understanding of the past.

The jazz breakdown at 2:42 provides crucial structural element that honors both the song’s easy listening accessibility and its emotional complexity. Rather than overwhelming the intimate scale of the confession, the instrumental section creates space for processing the weight of what’s been revealed, demonstrating sophisticated compositional understanding of how musical tension and release can serve psychological content.

Perhaps most effectively, the track captures the particular isolation that accompanies medical crisis—not just physical separation but existential displacement from previously stable categories of self-understanding. When HERÁ admits “Needless to say, I was lonely/In this struggle and fight,” she’s describing more than social isolation but fundamental alienation from her own previous assumptions about who she was and who she might become.

The bridge’s repetitive “I don’t I don’t know” creates moment of pure uncertainty that refuses resolution or false comfort. This formal choice transforms not-knowing from problem to be solved into state to be inhabited, suggesting that some forms of identity disruption require learning to function within uncertainty rather than rushing toward premature closure.

“Before And After Tragedy” succeeds because it treats serious illness as complex identity experience rather than simple medical event. Through careful attention to the actual psychological territory of catastrophic diagnosis, HERÁ has created something that expands available language for discussing how bodies and identities relate to each other—particularly valuable contribution to contemporary music’s ongoing exploration of health, identity, and resilience.