With an immersive video to match, there is something of the wild and beautiful environment of Australia’s southern isle in the new single from Lutruwita/Tasmanian artist Abby Wallace. ‘Atlantic Blue’ swirls with a hypnotic eddy as Wallace’s yearning vocals thread their way through: a hint of melancholy and blue, immersive and heartbreakingly beautiful.
Wallace says of the track:
‘Atlantic Blue’ is about plunging into the ocean. The verses chronicle an internal chaos–an unrelenting internal dialogue about my relationship to intimacy, the complexity of yearning for a thing (in this case connection) while simultaneously being completely averse to it. The chorus is about finding peace–breaking the surface and landing on a moment of reprieve. This centrepoint of the song speaks to my enduring relationship with the ocean as a place of safety and reprieve. A felt sense of relief. How the welcome, wet weight of leaving one world and slipping into another is something I have returned to again and again, since childhood.
Indeed the ocean becomes a palimpsest for emotions and there is an undercurrent of the Antarctic chill weaving throughout, the vocal like tendrils of sea flora swaying to the instrumentation. Wallace has a delicate velvet voice and reminds me of fellow antipodean artists like Juice Webster and Nat Vazer.
This video was filmed on Palawa Country at Tiralina/Eaglehawk Neck in Lutruwita/Tasmania directed by Wallace herself with Nick Green. That’s waters straight from the Antarctic:
‘Atlantic Blue’ is out now and available to stream and download here.
Feature Photograph: Abby Wallace
