Need a boost? New Zealand singer-songwriter Sarah Mary Chadwick has your back! Hark to the rambunctious country-punk of recent single Let’s Fight: “At 15, couldn’t shake the feeling that life would never let my tears dry/ And it’s never let my tears dry… the one time that I was right.” Well… every cloud, right?
That’s on the light side for Chadwick, who spent a decade at the head of Kiwi grungers Batrider before going solo in 2012. Her last record, 2019’s The Queen Who Stole the Sky, was written on Melbourne town hall’s grand organ, and probed deeply into grief after the death of her father and her former partner. That darkness hasn’t lifted entirely on her new record, Please Daddy: “I thought I was past this, but I’m losing it,” she confesses on the opening track, When Will Death Come, an end-of-the-night crooner inspired by late Elvis; the self-portrait on the cover depicts her as a naked, lumpen boogeywoman in harsh black brushstrokes.
And yet the record, heavy on 70s singer-songwriter piano flavoured by her favourites, Elliott Smith and Daniel Johnston, and lifted up by flourishes of flute and trumpet, doesn’t feel like a drag. Chadwick’s voice grabs you too hard: deep and throaty, it makes no concessions to prettiness, but drowns in soul and feels close as family. “My songs never achieve what they’re for,” she sings on Nothing Sticks, but she’s wrong; after immersion in Chadwick’s rich sadness, you come out feeling cleansed.
Please Daddy is out now on Sinderlyn
