“There’s a very long list of exceptions \u2026 It allows space for nuance.<\/p>\n
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Bad Things Feel Good* is the emotive second album from Rowena Wise. (Supplied: Beloved Records)<\/p>\n
“I just decided I was in this head space of ‘Actually I don’t want to tell a clean story about who I am, about morality or love. I’d like to sit in the grey area a bit’. And each song touches on that in a way.”<\/p>\n
Rejecting simplistic narratives, the album was written while Wise came to terms with “complicated stuff”, a messy period involving relationships, mental health and identity crises.<\/p>\n
On the ambling title track, she sings of tossing out a faulty moral compass (“the needle’s wigging out”) in favour of following her heart, her sensitivity underscored by plaintive strumming and sighing pedal steel.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, The Anchor is a tender, spartan tune in which the burden of love feels as crushing as the titular weight.<\/p>\n
What ties the album together is that the person in each track, “which is a bit of myself and a bit of others, was standing at the edge of something: of realising, of unbecoming, of transforming”.<\/p>\n
Blood Ties<\/p>\n
Born and raised in Margaret River, Western Australia, Wise grew up part of a family band. Her father, a luthier, hand-made her first instruments.<\/p>\n
“I’m so lucky! He’s coming up to five decades of making guitars.”<\/p>\n
Her custom collection includes an acoustic guitar, ukulele, dulcimer and a violin, her primary instrument.<\/p>\n
“I like to think my melodies are informed by my background of playing violin,” says Wise, who arranged strings for her new album.<\/p>\n
At 18, after relocating to Melbourne, she began releasing music under the mononym Ro. Her 2024 debut Senseless Acts of Beauty was shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize, marking her as a keen-edged songwriter. And she’s only grown sharper.<\/p>\n
She’s got a way with setting difficult experiences to music that fans of Julia Jacklin, Stella Donnelly<\/a>, Carla Geneve<\/a> and Gena Rose Bruce<\/a> will recognise and admire.<\/p>\n Having opened for Ball Park Music, Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey, Rowena Wise embarks on a headline tour from October. (Supplied: Nick Mckk)<\/p>\n Whether operating in intimate solo mode or fronting a live band, Wise’s elegant, drawn-out vocal phrasing makes you lean in and pay attention to her perceptive lyrics.<\/p>\n Inspired by a close friend’s heartbreak, Diamond in the Rough reckons with the pressures of maintaining impossible standards.<\/p>\n “I remember watching her still try to be charming and capable around everyone while privately falling apart. She had built so much of her identity around being exceptional, impressive and desirable.<\/p>\n “It made me think about how praise can quietly become a cage.”<\/p>\n Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n The song became about embracing the freedom found in stepping off a perfect pedestal, with strings and slide guitar swelling around Wise as she confides:<\/p>\n “Don’t believe what you’ve been told \/ You’re made of flesh, you’re made of blood \/ You are enough.”<\/p>\n The track Blood Ties uses gently distorted guitars to chronicle the experience of another of Wise’s friends going through mental illness with their emotionally repressed dad.<\/p>\n “His father loved him, but he didn’t quite have the emotional tools to hold space for talking about what was going on.<\/p>\n “He’d grown up in a time where showing vulnerability, especially as a male, was seen as weakness rather than an opportunity to strengthen bonds between loved ones.<\/p>\n “I also saw that my friend had inherited that tendency to just remain silent and hence he didn’t reach out enough to his loved ones and family and went through a really hard time.”<\/p>\n Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n You wouldn’t guess it from the unguarded way she untangles knotty topics, but Wise says she’s had “trouble showing vulnerability”, having grown up with a “small country town” mentality.<\/p>\n “I think it’s so important to be honest with those that you love, otherwise there’s this distance that’s created. You’ve got to really open up.”<\/p>\n Changing how she saw love<\/p>\n Wise reunited with producer Rob Muinos for Bad Things Feel Good*, recording at his Collingwood studio, The Ratshack.<\/p>\n She spent three days “crammed in a tiny room” knocking out each song with a live band: bassist Rich Bradbeer, drummer Jess Ellwood and Matt Dixon on pedal steel.<\/p>\n “We all together just found a vibe. It was magic.”<\/p>\n The ensemble’s patient, understated backing adds a rounded, organic quality that accentuates Wise’s emotions without overshadowing their intimacy.<\/p>\n A steady rhythm section shepherds the stand-out Unlearning of Love, fuzzy guitars clouding around Wise “coming apart” from an experience with non-monogamy.<\/p>\n It captures the “curious, terrifying but beautiful” tension and thrill of “forming a new connection with someone and not knowing where it sits between platonic and romantic. And wondering if you have to label it at all”.<\/p>\n Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n The song feels like a companion piece to last year’s No Cure For Love<\/a>, a moving duet with then-partner and fellow solo artist Didirri (their collaboration dates back to their 2019 song Tea Stains<\/a>).<\/p>\n Whether scrutinising love or friendships, “unlearning inherited ideas” is a central theme to Bad Things Feel Good*, gifting its songs a sense of uncertainty but also authenticity.<\/p>\n Now in her 30s, Wise believes that, in real life, there is no absolute right or wrong, just “people [who] will try and do their best even if it’s not good enough”.<\/p>\n Above all else, she still believes in music as “one of the only magic things in the world, because it transcends all sorts of geographic and demographic boundaries”.<\/p>\n “It’s just got this power of making a whole room of [different] people feel the same thing at the same time.<\/p>\n “And therefore, everyone becomes something beyond themselves. It’s as close to spirituality as I think I get.”<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/28e9d9caeb371de757382b4fea6c5d85.jpeg\")
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