Following up a debut album never comes easy, but Sydney-based soul artist Ngaiire saw it as an opportunity to make a statement: her forthcoming album’s title, Blastoma, is a defiant, direct reference to the cancer that was diagnosed in her adrenal glands at age three.
“By the time I was five, I was very much aware of what was going on,” the 31-year-old artist says over coffee in Redfern. “I knew I needed to be strong: couldn’t sulk, couldn’t feel sorry for myself. I just had to deal with it.”
Ngaiire was born in Lae, the capital of Morobe province and the second-largest city in Papua New Guinea. When she was nine months old, her family moved to Palmerston, New Zealand, where her father took up an environmental science scholarship, and where her brother and sister were born.
Did she grasp the concept of cancer early on? “Not entirely,” she says. “I knew there was something bad growing inside me. I made friends with other kids in hospital who’d pass away, and I’d still be fighting. I understood that could happen to me as well.”
The cancer left its physical and emotional mark. “I’ve got a massive scar across my stomach. I got teased a lot at school, for having no hair, and for being smaller than the other kids. The treatment stunted my growth,” she says.
“I kind of carried that into my adult years, but I’d always put my mind to whatever I wanted to do, no matter what anybody said.”
At eight, Ngaiire’s family was told she was in the clear. The cover of Blastoma recreates her bald years, with latex and makeup covering her long, thick tresses. She’s due for her next oncological checkup at the end of this year.
Ngaiire co-produced the new album and is releasing it on her own label, Maximilion Brown. It contains the lead single, the funky Once, which she co-wrote with Megan Washington and Paul Mac – a song that landed her 73rd place in last year’s Triple J’s Hottest 100 – and the follow-up, Diggin’.
For the third single, House on a Rock, Ngaiire shot a new video in an apartment in Tel Aviv, a city that is “rustic and rundown, and a beautiful setting”.
That song is “based on a personal relationship I had – a few, actually – that I thought was never going end … but these things do, regardless of how many counselling sessions you go to, or how many self-help books you read”.
Another track, I Can’t Hear God Anymore, is “a metaphor for someone who I had a spiritual connection with, in terms of music. That relationship came to an end, and I haven’t had that connection with anybody else”.
The Christian missionary influence was strong in Papua New Guinea; Ngaiire’s grandfather was a preacher. “I basically grew up in church,” she says. “I don’t practice as much now. It was confusing for me, trying to find out where I fit in today’s world, with what my parents had taught me.”
When her father’s scholarship in New Zealand ran out, the family moved back to their homeland. Ngaiire recalls one morning, in 1994, running up the hallway of their Rabaul home, thinking the tremors shaking the house were fun. A volcano was about to erupt.
“My dad was like: ‘We’ve got to get out of here’. So we went to my grandmother’s house overnight, woke up and there was ash coming out of the sky,” she recalls. “We borrowed a car and drove out of the city. There were loads of people getting out, carrying what they could. Two hours later, the volcano mushroomed into the sky. We were like: fuck, faster!
“Another one erupted in the direction we were heading. We thought: ‘What the hell do we do?’ Some people turned back. Surprisingly, only two people died – only because people were very connected to the land, so they were attuned to what was happening.
“Ours was an old colonial house, so it had no chance. All our childhood photos were gone. We didn’t have insurance. We went from one refugee camp to the next for three months.
“We were in the bush with no electricity, no running water, no contact with the outside world. At that time, my parents had split up, and my mother was working on the mainland [in Lae]. She was panicking: ‘Where are my children?’
“She sent a message through talkback radio, and one of my uncles heard it. She sent a chartered airplane to come pick us up.”
It was only when Ngaiire came to Australia, settling in Lismore at age 16, that she understood Australian society was different for women. In Papua New Guinea, she had been raised to understand that looking people in the eye was disrespectful. Women in her homeland were not allowed to speak up so much, she explains.
Observing other teenagers in Australia taught her that eye contact was about respect and confidence.
Indeed, check the glint in her eye in the Once video, or the clip of her performing a cover of Tame Impala’s The Less I Know in the Triple J studio, and you’d think she was now an extrovert. But you’d be wrong.
“I’m a total introvert,” she laughs. “I can go days without seeing anyone. I intentionally book a room for myself, apart from the band, so I can have my own time.”
• Blastoma is released on 10 June on Maximilion Brown; Ngaiire’s Australian tour kicks off at Perisher Valley, New South Wales, on 10 June
