INTERVIEW: Amy Shark on her third studio 'Sunday Sadness', out August 9th: "At the end of the day, good music prevails, and as long as the song is strong, that's all I really care about."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published 8 August 2024

Australian superstar Amy Shark launches her third studio album, Sunday Sadness, tomorrow. It is her first album release in over 3 years.

Featuring eleven tracks, Sunday Sadness comes from two distinct, but interrelated places: emotional memory and allowing yourself musical freedom. There is a heavy sense of nostalgia, and looking back, that threads throughout the album, with the title inspired by that low feeling we all get on a Sunday afternoon when we realise the weekend is over and the return to work or school looms large. “There’s something in the air and it still sucks to me. It feels like there's a different colour grade on a Sunday in the world,” Shark says. This feeling is present in songs that look back at Shark’s younger days, or past relationships, and the sense of innocence and freedom that is apparent in hindsight.

The other main driver behind Sunday Sadness is Shark finally embracing the freedom to make the kind of music she has always wanted to. While her previous releases have always focused heavily on pop and pop-rock, at heart Shark says her passion has always been guitars and punk. “I love guitars, and that's why I had so much fun with this album,” she says. “It’s very guitar driven, I loved fiddling with and playing guitar a lot, I love so many of the riffs in it. I’m just super proud that that's been the bones of this album.”

As a result, the album is a beguiling mix of sounds and feels, with heavy, rock out moments sitting authentically alongside warm, nostalgia drenched pop and even forays into more electronic-dance pop, such as single ‘Can I Shower At Yours’, an urgent, energetic song that blurs the line between genres so successfully you could easily describe it as either a funky dance pop song or a guitar based rock track.

‘Loving Me Lover’, one of the singles from the album, has a lush summery pop feel that speaks of being away from the one you love and feeling guilty for enjoying the freedom: ‘I know you don't believe me, but to you, I am devoted…I love you and you know it.’ “It’s a dreamy love song based around happy guilt,” Shark said on the song’s release. “I was in LA by myself working on music, there were things happening back home, people missing me being around and I remember feeling guilty enjoying this completely different life.”

‘It’s Nice To Feel This Way Again’ is a soulful, beautiful pop track with magnetic melodies and a recurring clap beat with lyrics that look at a complicated relationship that is falling apart, even though Shark doesn’t necessarily want it do. ‘What are we going to do with all this mess? / Just compartmentalise all of it / What am I gonna say when you get dressed?…I want to feel you in my world again.’ Throughout, it is punctuated with memories of youthful relationships. ‘Listening to the song we liked / Listening to the song and then I’m breaking down.’

‘Gone’ brings in a more dance pop sound, with a touch of early 1980s new wave, and gives a powerful brush off to an ex with the opening lyric definitively setting the scene: ‘Now it’s gone / Everything we built together.’ ‘Two Friends’ showcases Shark’s beloved guitars and pop punk and again revisits the nostalgia of youth with a story of friends who fall in love: ‘I wish we could tell the whole world / We're two friends who are falling and falling in love’. There is a charming wistfulness about the song that evokes schoolyard crushes and both hiding the truth from but also confiding in your friends, that is highlighted at the end of the song when Shark sings of how the revelation of a romance spreads like wildfire through a friend circle. ‘So Sarah told Becky, and Becky told Tegan…And Daniel told Katie / Now Katie fucking hates me.’

By consciously shifting her focus to what she wants, and the music that drives and inspires her, with Sunday Sadness, Shark has made arguably her strongest collection to date. It is almost a cliché to say, but it truly is an album that has something for everything. The wistful, dreamy, nostalgia moments you can happily wallow in when the mood takes you are counteracted by punchy rock soundscapes to fire you up, while finally there are plenty of moments of just pure pop joy to dance the night away to in a kitchen disco. It was already hard to deny Shark is one of the most talented and brilliant Australian artists of her generation, with Sunday Sadness, she doesn’t just solidify that reputation but sets the bar even higher. Undoubtedly one of the top Australian albums of the year, we recently sat down with Shark to chat all about the creation of Sunday Sadness.

Hi Amy, it is so good to chat to you. First of all, how is everything with you?
Things are good. Things feel chaotic, but it’s organised chaos. That's always what it feels like!

I just have to say, with Sunday Sessions, you do nostalgia so well. You have this beautiful language and reflective process, which I think is really, really gorgeous. Talk to me a little bit about this.
Oh, that’s sweet. 'm never going to be an artist, I don't think anyway, that's going to be like, ‘now I'm doing dance'. The way I write is always just going to be the way I write. And this album in particular there's so many memories, but also current feelings as well, of just managing. Having a job that's not really nine to five, and this is probably, like, my eighth year of being a professional musician, and I still don't really feel like I have a grip on it. I have no routine, there's no structure, and there never will be. it might be okay if you've been an artist, and that's all you’ve known since you were, 17, but I did have a whole other life before music, and I feel like there's always something that I haven't really tackled, or an issue that I'm not comfortable with yet, or a memory that I wish I could forget that comes back. The reason it's called Sunday Sadness is that's the time where I usually sit with it, and that's usually the time I work on songs or listen back to demos. This album is still the same, but different, it’s been me challenging myself to write the best songs and get the song sounding as good as they possibly can, and have it be a solid body of work.

What I love about this album, and particularly a song like ‘Two Friends’, everyone knows you're in a long-term relationship, but on this album, you're talking about times before you were married, or before you had even met your partner. And it’s like you're thinking through those times, like you said before, reflecting on a Sunday afternoon. Is that something you consciously leant towards, or is that just where your songwriting's been going?
I feel lucky that I've been in a relationship for as long as I have, but it's not to say that we haven't both had our times before each other. I think that's the best part about being with the person I'm with now, he doesn't care what I write about. So I've got free rein to dive into whatever memory I have, whether it's me and him or someone else. I just go for it. A lot of the time, it's where the music takes me. So ‘Two Friends’ n particular was exciting, because Sam de Jong, who produced it, sent me the music, the bones of the song, and I just wrote on top of it, and that's what came out. That's the memory, that's the story. It just sounded really urgent and really rebellious and fun. So that's where my mind went.

Yeah it's definitely sung with a boot in the best possible way.
Yeah it's my first little dip into pop punk with those grungy guitars and distorted guitars.

On that note, we spoke before about how you can questioning what you can do with your own music, and I guess now with where you are at with your career, and all the accolades, are you now at the point of ‘you know what, I like what I like, and I'm going to write what I like’?
Yeah, I think I've always been so vocal about my love for pop punk and punk in general, and that's been my upbringing. A lot of melodies I use are borrowed from bands like NOFX and Millencolin, and I just so happened to land in this genre of pop, but you never put yourself in that. I never wrote 'Adore', thinking 'I'm going to be a pop artist'. I just wrote a song, and then it became popular, so that's where I have ended up. I love pop music for what it's known as, that really high end production, almost glossy sounding music. But I also love guitars, and that's why I had so much fun with this album, fiddling with it and playing guitar a lot. It's very guitar driven this album, and I just love so many of the riffs in it. I’m just super proud that that's been the bones of this album.

I think that's great, and really this is your ‘Sunday sadness’. Pulling in all those memories or where we've grown up, of books and pop culture and whatever, of Sunday being back in your room with your guitar, your music on and a big old sandwich, just going, ‘Okay, let me process the week.’
I just feel like Sunday sadness for me, it doesn't have an age to it. I used to hate Sundays, even as as a kid, knowing I had school the next day, I would be like, ‘fuck, I hate this, this afternoon, evening, feeling’. There's something in the air and it sucks, and it still sucks to me. It feels like there's a different colour grade on a Sunday in the world.

Going back to this idea of nostalgia, your sound has a location to it. It's got this almost kind of long walk feel to it. Anyone that's ever lived or grown up in the suburbs and has had to walk home from a party or go to somewhere else will know that time to either walk or get the train home anywhere, is a really reflective period for you.
That's a really good way of putting it, the walk home. A lot of my memories are walking home, either with someone or alone, or talking about someone to someone or just walking in the neighbourhood I was in. I was always close to everything. I'd walk to school, it was across the road. It was funny, because every time I was late, I'd say ‘oh, it was traffic’. And they'd be like, ‘Amy, you live across the road, we know that it wasn't traffic!’ Parks where you'd go and have park parties. There was a cemetery nearby, so we'd always go walking the cemetery like absolute emo losers! So you're right, real walking vibes.

When you released the single ‘Only Wanna Be With You', you mentioned that M-Phazes who produced ‘Adore’ had said to you, 'I really like it, but I miss sad girl Amy'.
It's really hard to maintain excitement when you've on your second, third album, whatever. And I remember thinking, I've got to somewhat make people miss that side of me. So there was a bit of a strategy to it, even though I hate having strategy to music, because it's really not why I got into it, But if I'm going to be honest, that was a part of it, do this different style and make people, like what Phazes says, ‘I miss the sad Amy’.

On that note, you've spoken to me before about the importance of an image, as much as you hate it. You've spoken about how hard it was for you to break through in this industry and how you are almost forced to keep changing it up and reinventing. Do you feel because now these discussions are happening, it's getting any easier for up and coming artists,?
Oh, man, I just feel for so many artists, because it's this weird, like lightning strike of a moment where you just need to have everything popping, all jets need to be firing. It really is like a lottery. Even back when 'Adore' happened, that was still quite a simple process. I still had to have a bit of luck, I still had to have people back the song, and it still needed to get played. But that was back when if you got one play on Triple J, you were set, but that has shifted now. Triple J are not the only ones, now there's Spotify and Apple and TikTok and all these other things. It's so widespread and it's exhausting for a lot of artists who maybe don't have the confidence just yet to just pick an avenue and just be ‘we're just going to work at this’. It's stressful. And then a lot of the time, people even forget about the song and the music, they're so caught up with wanting all these other things. Now there's songs dropping every second, and it’s inundated with bedroom producers and TikTok artists, and it's wild out there. It's scary

Well, Sunday Sadness really is such a beautiful, beautiful album. And I really love how you've lent into it, and by the sounds of it, you had a real party creating it with all the guitars.
It’s been so fun

Apart from just leaning into what you wanted, did you push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit at all on the album? Or were you just like, no, this is actually what I wanted to make
Kind of, I have always loved acoustic songs and I've always wanted to be an artist that can write really beautiful acoustic songs, but because I am in this genre, it's a bit scary just doing that. So I tried to find a balance where I could still have songs that had a life on radio, but still had me in there playing my acoustic guitar. It's always a balance with me, trying to do something different, but still in the same vein. I don't want to try just for the sake of trying. At the end of the day, good music prevails, and as long as the song is strong, that's all I really care about. The song being the best version of the song.

At the heart of it is me and the guitar. I've just always believed in staying in your lane and doing it really well and testing yourself and trying to definitely test the waters, but I'm kind of doing that in other areas, you know, With things like Idol, and I just did a movie. Things that still scare me, but music's my safe place. We could meet again in another year, and I'll probably be doing something crazy, like rap, but right now, it's my comfort zone. It's the music that I make and the style I make it in.

And it doesn't get much more comfort zone than Sunday Sadness with a big pile of spaghetti! Lastly, before we go you, you've got a killer tour happening with this one as well. The big arenas and you and a guitar.
I've got a quite the catalogue now, which I'm excited about, because you actually tend to forget. I’ll be able play those songs from [previous albums] Love Monster and Cry Forever. And as much as it's called Sunday Sadness, 'Gone' is one of the most fast paced bangers, and 'Two Friends' is so good live.

Oh, there’s some bops on there!
Yeah. Like, Can I Shower At Yours?' and 'It's Gonna Be'. And then there’s, the balance of 'Our Time Together', and 'My Only Friend'. It's gonna be a really nice, balanced tour. It's gonna be a good set list. It's an exciting set list!

Sunday Sadness will be released on August 9 by Sony Music. You can pre-order and pre-save now.
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