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Amy Shark is a hugger. When I meet her, she embraces me so firmly my chest bone audibly cracks. “Yep,” she says. “I love hard.”
She immediately strikes me as down-to-earth, practical and no-nonsense. For our interview, she’s wearing a black-and-white-striped, long-sleeve tee, baggy selvedge jeans, black socks and chunky black sandals. Her long brown hair is in its signature topknot. When she answers a question, she looks me dead in the eye.
We’re catching up to chat about her new music, including the newly released first single The Biggest Dick, from her fourth album, soft pop – a stripped-back, intimate offering driven by melody and story. It’s a swerve from her last two albums, Cry Forever (2021) and Sunday Sadness (2024), both heavy on the beats and production values.
“I’m still so excited that people listen to my music,” she says. “I’m really aware that with fourth albums, it’s hard to keep the interest there. I had to push a few boundaries. I switched up my microphones. It basically sounds like I’m actually in your ear hole.”
Shark (whose civilian name is Amy Louise Billings; her stage name is in honour of her favourite movie, Jaws) was first encouraged to play a musical instrument by her nan while growing up in Southport, on the Gold Coast. She started taking guitar lessons, and it resonated. “Because it was something I could do by myself, I just got obsessed with it. I wanted to sound good,” she says.
Being a young artist in a place as sports-obsessed as the Gold Coast in the ’90s meant finding like-minded people. “I guess my friend group was pretty androgynous,” she says. “We didn’t have bleached blonde hair. We were pale and listened to Deftones and our parents were all divorced. You just migrate to the people who are like you.”
She says she was the only member of her sports-focused family who liked performing. “My mum was creative but when it came to putting yourself out there, she was so nervous for me that she couldn’t relate,” says Shark. “She was just like, ‘I don’t know why you do that to yourself.’” (She says it took travelling around the world to help her understand how sheltered her upbringing had actually been.)
Her singing voice was an accidental discovery while she was playing with her high school band, Dorothy’s Rainbow and Hansel Kissed Gretel. She was trying to explain a melody idea. She sang it out, it sounded good. “So I kind of started then,” she says. “The band broke up, the drummer got pregnant, and the bassist was always way too smart for us. She went off to uni to do some double degree or something.”
Zimmermann dress, Shark’s own shoes and socks.Jedd Cooney
Zimmermann dress and pants.Jedd Cooney
At the time, she was just getting to know her now-husband and business manager, Shane Billings, who encouraged her to start sending out her demos and performing as a solo artist. To this day, their lives remain intertwined, which she describes as an ongoing balance, like anyone’s relationship.
“I think the good outweighs the bad because we talk the same language – we love music,” she says. “He’s still got his hands in sport – he used to work in football – and he’s really good with numbers. So he’s got his other life as well as managing me, and I’ve got my other life as well as music. It doesn’t feel like we’re on top of each other.”
It’s been a decade since Shark first hit the Australian airwaves. Her breakout song, Adore, came second in the 2016 Triple J Hottest 100 and has since gone platinum seven times. In 2018, she released her debut album, Love Monster. On her subsequent albums, she co-wrote and worked with artists as disparate as Keith Urban, Ed Sheeran and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker.
On the other hand, she wrote soft pop by herself over the course of a month. “I think you can forget why you like writing songs,” she says, “so it felt really cool to put that belief back, like when I wrote Love Monster. I was like, ‘I wonder why I don’t trust myself any more?’”
For some, fame is the main course of a music career. For Shark, it’s a side dish – all she ever really wanted to do was write and record songs. Perhaps that’s the reason the limelight has been kind to the 39-year-old. “I don’t get too badly harassed,” she says of fame. “I feel like I can slither through the world OK. I mean, when people do recognise me, they’re always nice.”
Acne Studios jacket and pants. Alma Ines singlet.Jedd Cooney
Mii Collection jacket and skirt from Edited Agency.Jedd Cooney
While the negative comments of online trolls slide off her back, she remains confused by their motivation. “It makes no sense to me, especially to people who are just making art. They’re out there just creating art or music or performance – it’s not like they’re Hitler. Maybe their personality doesn’t rub you the right way, but at least they’re doing something. I don’t know, it blows my mind.”
Shark has also recently broken into the world of film, acting alongside Academy Award winner Russell Crowe in Beast, in which she plays Rose, a former mixed martial arts fighter turned trainer. Crowe plays a grizzled trainer and ex-con who works with Rose to prepare champion Patton James (Daniel MacPherson) for the fight of his life. “I love fight movies,” says the singer. “I auditioned twice, got it, and it was the coolest thing I’ve ever done. Hardest thing I’ve ever done, but coolest.”
It’s a big role and Shark, with no MMA fighting experience, had limited time to prepare. “I had to look tough, really push Dan [MacPherson] around and look like I’m not intimidated or like it didn’t hurt when he was really hitting the pads. I was so sore.”
Naturally wiry, Shark was in good running shape, but to be believable as a fighter she needed to start lifting weights. “My trainer was so great, he worked me really hard.” But mainly, she says, it was a mental thing. “It was like, ‘Don’t flinch, give it to me again.’ I just had to feel it and really get in the zone. Learn that I am training this guy and I will be embarrassed if he doesn’t step up.
“I remember the first day I was in the ring with all these cameras and lights, never having done this before in my life,” she says. “I could just see [Russell] standing watching – it’s one of those moments where embarrassment isn’t a thing. You’re better off going for it than half-arsing it.”
The singer says the motto she lives by is “You know, what’s the worst that can happen?” adding, “Whenever an artist asks me for advice I’m like, ‘Prepare to be embarrassed and don’t care.’”
Shark says acting alongside Russell Crowe was “the best thing ever, but terrifying. Not many people could say they had a mentor like him in their very first movie.” She recalls one scene in which the actor pulled her aside. “He was like, ‘You’re still too animated. Kill it all.’ He gets himself in that space very quickly. That’s why he’s the best.”
I wonder if any of the work she’s done as a judge on reality talent show Australian Idol has helped her make that transition into filmmaking, whether those 15-hour days of bringing singer after hopeful singer back down to earth involve a lot of acting.
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“I’ve learnt ways to be like, ‘It’s good that you like singing if it makes you happy,’” she says. “I think that’s the most exhausting part about it – meeting someone, watching them perform and then thinking about how to let them down without shattering them. You are just constantly trying to think of the right things to say.”
When she hears people singing her own songs to her, Shark says she wants one of two things. “I either want someone to be super terrible or super great. Just set me on fire rather than tell me I’m vanilla and forgettable.”
Beast is in cinemas April 23. soft pop will be released July 31.
Fashion editor: Penny McCarthy; Hair: David Keough using John Frieda; Make-up: Heidi Scarlett King using Merit; Fashion assistant: Abbey Stockwell.
Stockists: Acne Studios; Alma Ines; Edited Agency; Wynn Hamlyn; Zimmermann.
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