Emma Russack - About the Girl '2024

Tracks list

When desire loses its direction - with no person or object to pin itself to - it
has a strange tendency to turn us toward the past. We find ourselves surveying
past infatuations and failed romances. Armed with the knowledge of hindsight,
previous entanglements reconfigure and reveal themselves. Sometimes, we become
privy to the true nature of our attraction, or learn the patterns that have
played out across our romantic lives to which we have been blind. Nothing can be
quite as bracing or mortifying.

Emma Russack would know. These reassessments and revelations stretch across
About The Girl, her brilliant, searching sixth record, produced by Russack and
long-time collaborator John Lee at Phaedra Studios. This is an album about
longing’s impossible force, tackling how relationships both muddle and
illuminate one’s sense of self. Russack says the record is partly
inspired by the dissociations brought on by dating apps. “It’s
about the funny experiences that happen when you’re untethered” she
says, “I had these awful experiences and encounters, that made me also
reflect on my past experiences with different people, romantic or
otherwise.”

Often, Russack sings in a daze, trying to grasp the contours of memories that
have blurred. But she hauls specificity back with hard-won vigour, pasting
details together and creating new constellations of understanding. In the thrall
of past experience, Russack’s songwriting reaches new heights; merging
plain-spoken disclosures with mordant humour. History’s constant murmur
is felt through the record’s spectral, spacious sound, full of elegant
harmonies, heavily strummed guitar and ominous synths that reverberate and
splutter.

Fascination sits at the glistening centre of the record. It appears in
full-force on the title track, a beguiling synth-pop song about the allure of
the inscrutable. Russack was thinking about Todd Field’s Tar, but also
the brilliant and puzzling people in her own life who are full of persuasive
charm (Russack perfectly verbalises that eternal predicament we often find
ourselves in with friends: “go out for one drink, stay out for
more”). For the song, Russack had imagined a wave of strings, but ended up
doing the parts herself, modulating her voice to replicate orchestral movements.
The results are hypnotic and sly.

Obsession is also the subject of ‘In 2001’, a diaristic track where
Russack recounts her consuming adoration with Dave Grohl as a preteen. “My
friend and I would go to the payphone on a weekend, call the telephone directory
in the U.S.A. and ask for a David Grohl in Virginia, where he lived at the
time,” says Russack. Its particular genius is how it braids together the
titanic feelings of a formative crush with the arrival of the home computer.
Here, desire is not only relegated to daydreams, but finds a new conduit in
technology - which, as we know, will come to absorb our attention not unlike
romance does. With hushed vocals and delicate finger-picked guitar, the song has
a profound intimacy, as if Russack might be recording from her childhood
bedroom.

She may be looking back, but Russack is acutely aware of the cyclical nature of
existence. “Fragile, I have become, a lifetime of reruns,” she sings
on ‘Time’, a lamentation on how those head-spinning heights of
adoration grow elusive as one gets older, and more used to disappointment. The
sound is similarly mournful, with Russack singing with a breathy languor, as
murky synths ripple throughout.

That’s not to say that growth is impossible. ‘That’s Not
Free’ contains the realisation that the impulse to win or prove oneself
after the end of a relationship helps no one. “Or even striving to win in
any kind of argument or disagreement,” says Russack, “learning that
it doesn’t equal freedom.”

And then there is ‘Everything is Big’, a tender, booming track
where personal crises tangle with the wider calamities of the world.
There’s a rattling urgency here, with swelling harmonies (provided by
musician Nathalie Pavlovic), fuzzy guitar lines and contemplative vocals. The
song asks: how do we determine what is trivial, and how does one establish
personal hierarchies of importance? Russack knows that sometimes we can only be
certain of our own small desires: “I just wanna see you around.”

Emma Russack was born in the coastal town of Narooma, NSW. She first gained
traction as a teenager, belting out covers of Joy Division and Neil Young on her
YouTube channel. She has spent the past decade performing across Australia and
Europe, as well as releasing a string of beautifully spare, and oftentimes
impish, records on loss and devotion. Her previous full-length solo albums
include the Australian Music Prize nominated Winter Blues (2019), Permanent
Vacation (2017), In a New State (2016), You Changed Me (2014) and Sounds of Our
City (2011). She has also recorded several duet records with musician Lachlan
Denton, and plays in the group Snowy Band. She lives in Melbourne. 

Tracklist:
01. Emma Russack - About the Girl (02:58)
02. Emma Russack - Everything is Big (02:32)
03. Emma Russack - I Know You Feel it Too (02:23)
04. Emma Russack - In 2001 (02:57)
05. Emma Russack - Is It Real? (02:44)
06. Emma Russack - It Makes Sense (01:43)
07. Emma Russack - That's Not Free (03:52)
08. Emma Russack - Things You Said (02:28)
09. Emma Russack - Time (03:24)
10. Emma Russack - What's in a Song (02:20)

Related artists