Confession

Her fourth album was recorded in a studio inside a partially decommissioned hospital in Castlemaine, regional Australia, and the building seeps in. Long corridors, emptied rooms, echoes with nowhere useful to go. Not gothic, just a particular stillness that makes interior noise louder. The instrumentals scattered through the record work as weather changes rather than filler, On the Ward especially, a dub-inflected bassline threading through silence that's building-shaped. Alone With You leans poppier and warmer, Nighttime moves the other way into dub-tinged post-punk atmospheres where AC Marias and Dome feel present without being imitated. Where Come Around had hooks and release, this one withholds. The voice sits closer in the mix, less draped in reverb, and the songs are diaristic in a way her earlier work rarely was. On Going Out she wants someone she probably shouldn't: "Shouldn't want to kiss you but I do." The plain syntax is doing real work. Under the Covers gives domestic routine the same attention as the charged material, melody barely moving, vocals close enough that you notice the breath. Dal Forno set out wanting abstraction and ended up somewhere more exposed, singing plainly even when plainness costs something.