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Singer-songwriter Tallulah Rose Wise releases her new album, rejecting simplistic narratives in favor of exploring the messy complexities of love, mental health, and identity through lush indie rock and folk-influenced melodies.
Mixing folksy earnestness with lush indie rock, her songs convey complex subject matter in accessible songs that contemplate "how we put pressure on ourselves to make the right choices, as though there's some moral scoreboard tallying everything up", Wise explains.
"But life is much messier than that … Growth can often come through choices and experiences that don't neatly fit into good or bad. "The asterisk in the title of new album Bad Things Feel Good* is designed as the "start of an unspoken footnote, implying that not all bad things feel good", Wise tells"I just decided I was in this head space of 'Actually I don't want to tell a clean story about who I am, about morality or love.
I'd like to sit in the grey area a bit'. And each song touches on that in a way.
" Rejecting simplistic narratives, the album was written while Wise came to terms with "complicated stuff", a messy period involving relationships, mental health and identity crises. On the ambling title track, she sings of tossing out a faulty moral compass in favour of following her heart, her sensitivity underscored by plaintive strumming and sighing pedal steel.
Elsewhere, The Anchor is a tender, spartan tune in which the burden of love feels as crushing as the titular weight. What ties the album together is that the person in each track, "which is a bit of myself and a bit of others, was standing at the edge of something: of realising, of unbecoming, of transforming". Born and raised in Margaret River, Western Australia, Wise grew up part of a family band.
Her father, a luthier, hand-made her first instruments. Her custom collection includes an acoustic guitar, ukulele, dulcimer and a violin, her primary instrument.
"I like to think my melodies are informed by my background of playing violin," says Wise, who arranged strings for her new album. At 18, after relocating to Melbourne, she began releasing music under the mononym Ro. Her 2024 debut Senseless Acts of Beauty was shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize, marking her as a keen-edged songwriter. And she's only grown sharper.
Having opened for Ball Park Music, Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey, Rowena Wise embarks on a headline tour from October. Whether operating in intimate solo mode or fronting a live band, Wise's elegant, drawn-out vocal phrasing makes you lean in and pay attention to her perceptive lyrics. Inspired by a close friend's heartbreak, Diamond in the Rough reckons with the pressures of maintaining impossible standards.
"I remember watching her still try to be charming and capable around everyone while privately falling apart. She had built so much of her identity around being exceptional, impressive and desirable.
The song became about embracing the freedom found in stepping off a perfect pedestal, with strings and slide guitar swelling around Wise as she confides:The track Blood Ties uses gently distorted guitars to chronicle the experience of another of Wise's friends going through mental illness with their emotionally repressed dad.
"His father loved him, but he didn't quite have the emotional tools to hold space for talking about what was going on. "He'd grown up in a time where showing vulnerability, especially as a male, was seen as weakness rather than an opportunity to strengthen bonds between loved ones.
"I also saw that my friend had inherited that tendency to just remain silent and hence he didn't reach out enough to his loved ones and family and went through a really hard time. "You wouldn't guess it from the unguarded way she untangles knotty topics, but Wise says she's had "trouble showing vulnerability", having grown up with a "small country town" mentality.
"I think it's so important to be honest with those that you love, otherwise there's this distance that's created. You've got to really open up.
"Wise reunited with producer Rob Muinos for Bad Things Feel Good*, recording at his Collingwood studio, The Ratshack. She spent three days "crammed in a tiny room" knocking out each song with a live band: bassist Rich Bradbeer, drummer Jess Ellwood and Matt Dixon on pedal steel. The ensemble's patient, understated backing adds a rounded, organic quality that accentuates Wise's emotions without overshadowing their intimacy.
A steady rhythm section shepherds the stand-out Unlearning of Love, fuzzy guitars clouding around Wise "coming apart" from an experience with non-monogamy. It captures the "curious, terrifying but beautiful" tension and thrill of "forming a new connection with someone and not knowing where it sits between platonic and romantic. And wondering if you have to label it at all".
Whether scrutinising love or friendships, "unlearning inherited ideas" is a central theme to Bad Things Feel Good*, gifting its songs a sense of uncertainty but also authenticity. Now in her 30s, Wise believes that, in real life, there is no absolute right or wrong, just "people will try and do their best even if it's not good enough".
Above all else, she still believes in music as "one of the only magic things in the world, because it transcends all sorts of geographic and demographic boundaries".
"It's just got this power of making a whole room of people feel the same thing at the same time.
Tallulah Rose Wise Bad Things Feel Good Indie Rock Album Review Australian Music
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