Naarm/Melbourne-based alternative indie folk artist Rowena Wise releases her second solo album on 7th August. Having just released a new music video featuring four minutes of improvised, interpretive dance, one might have expected her to have compiled a positive collection of songs. “There’s a song about realising that the most loving act is to let go of someone, and there’s also a song about sort of complex intimacy within like family dynamics, or within a romantic one, or with friends, or with someone you can’t really label your connection with. And there’s more themes about mental health, all throughout this new album”.
Rowena Wise
So, her album Bad Things Feel Good* might not be the cheeriest of records on its surface, but true to its title, she believes there is positivity to be found in acknowledging one’s flaws. Rowena Wise gave Rockshot Magazine a thorough guide through her new singles, her creative process, and how it has been to bring them to live audiences for the first time.
Some of the songs are in the same realm of heartache and loss as her 2024 debut album Senseless Acts Of Beauty, but Rowena explains that they come from a wider variety of narratives, and that she thinks that the themes feel “a little more diverse, and a little bit darker and maybe a little more intense. In this album, it’s kind of about tearing yourself apart a little bit, unlearning certain ways of who you thought you were, in order to learn different ways of being.”
With such heavy and personal subjects to deal with, Rowena achieved that rawness by use of live recording with her band, and realising her vision as accurately as possible with producer Rob Muinos, with whom she had recorded her debut album. “He was a wonderful person to work with. I trust him with my art”.
Rowena Wise
“Swinging From His Family Tree” – Writing Blood Ties
Rowena elaborates on these themes, and explains how Blood Ties, the first single from Bad Things Feel Good*, was written after a friend suffered from mental health problems, and she saw how connections with his father struggled. His father did not know how to approach the issue, and how to be supportive. “It’s about how emotional restraint has been normalised across different cultures over generations. I think, particularly in Australia, it’s getting better, but depression culturally has been framed as some sort of failure of character – something you can just sort of fix by working harder and keeping quiet”.
In what has become her signature style, Rowena uses candid imagery to tell her stories. The second verse of Blood Ties is set in a public mental hospital. “It’s kind of acknowledging that no one’s entirely at fault with these things. Not his father, not him. We’re all shaped by our environments that raised us, but it’s also encouraging the idea that silence is only going to perpetuate that generational cycle of distance between loved ones when it comes to talking about emotion and vulnerability.”
While the drums and bass functionally tick away a powerful groove, the distorted noise of her guitar frustratedly buzz within. “That kind of supports this idea of emotional restraint in a way. It’s funny. And those guitars, they do note about something bubbling away beneath the surface, simmering.”
Although Rowena has embraced this guitar sound, that is not to say that past influences have faded away. She grew up in a folk family band, the Wise Family Band, touring nationally and internationally on the folk festival circuit, and listened to a lot of classic 1960s folk songwriters, such as Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell. “I guess that everyone’s art is permeated by so many different factors in their past – what shapes them and their way of expressing themselves. I had it in my head from a young age, that to be able to tell a story, to condense a song in a way where you can create that very quick connection and narrative, and that way of writing is a beautiful thing”.
Rowena Wise
“You Are Enough” – New Single Diamond in the Rough
Instrumentally, that folk influence shines through in songs such as latest single Diamond In The Rough, which feature traditional sliding guitar and fiddle. Rowena explains her method when performing and recording the fiddle in her home studio. “The way I play is this weird expressive way that sounds quite folky and you can kind of hear it suited the end of the Diamond In The Rough, because it doesn’t sound very refined and classical. It kind of sounds like it’s falling apart a bit, which is really fun to record.”
Rowena explains that she was inspired by a friend who she saw struggling in the face of crushing pressure to be exceptional and successful, and needed assurance that “you are enough”, as the chorus declares. “It’s so much better to allow yourself to be a flawed human, and to allow yourself to make mistakes. And it’s so tragic when making mistakes seems like a scary thing, because maybe in your past someone made you feel small, or you just have this inner critic. It’s about allowing yourself to be. Jump off that pedestal and be an evolving human”.
These themes are demonstrated further by its striking single-take music video. The video is inspired by a scene from 2024 film The Last Showgirl, which features an extended take of Jamie Lee Curtis dancing in a casino foyer, and being ignored by passersby. In the video, Rowena dances while wearing heavy make-up and a sparkling red jacket. Her dazzling performance and appearance are in stark contrast with the gloomy but universally familiar living space around her.
She concedes with a laugh that “it’s not really dancing, it’s more like acting – I’m just kind of moving in a weird way”. However, it is quite deliberate, as she felt that a neat dance video would have defeated her intentions. “It was meant to be a little disembodied. I was trying to go for this feeling of some sort of tension and conflicts between my internal world, and my internal desire to be real, and the external pressure to perform. I was just kind of trying to feel that raw feeling when I was dancing, and I hopefully came across”.
She has just one regret about the video – “I wish I could have kept that jacket. It was from a costume hire place up the road from there. I loved that jacket!”
Taking Bad Things Feel Good* on Tour
In a live setting, her songs have taken on several forms. In the run-up to the release of Bad Things Feel Good*, she performed a short series of solo shows around Australia, bringing her new songs to stage for the first time. She has also announced the dates of the Australia album tour, which will feature her full band, and will commence in October 2026.
However, her songs took upon a scale that she hadn’t dreamt of, when Rowena was approached a few months ago by the Northside Musicians Choir. She says that she could absolutely get used to it. Having performed the second of the two special shows with the choir last night, she is still thrilled. “Oh man, it was amazing working with them. They arranged four of my songs, two of them were off the new album, Unlearning Of Love and Diamond In The Rough. That was just me on guitar and then them singing behind me, and it was so, so beautiful. So powerful. I wish I could play them like that live every single time”.
Applying such personal material to such spectacular experimentation, especially songs that had been performed so few times, gave them all a new and exhilarating life. “I’d equate the feeling to energetically running through a field and feeling like a bunch of wild horses running behind me, you know, with the playing of the songs and like trying to run with them. I’m not used to feeling eighty people sing behind me. It was wild”.
You can expect nothing but an honest stream of feelings from Rowena, and you can count on there being more to come. She laments that some of her songs were more difficult to perform than she had anticipated, but she will continue to record the emotions that she feels, and will perform them however they are meant to be heard, regardless of how sore the barre chords make her fingers. “Songs just come out of me – I couldn’t stop them from being what they are. They just had to come out as they did. So I’m just sitting with that!”
Rowena Wise
Interview with Rowena Wise by Nick Pollard, June 2026.
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