Emma Russack Shares 'Everything Is Big', Announces New Album + Signs To Dinosaur City

Acclaimed folk-pop artist Emma Russack (she/her) shares her first new music in three years, with ‘Everything is Big’. Alongside the new single – accompanied by a clip directed by Stephanie Day – is the announcement of her sixth full-length solo record About the Girl, out Friday, August 22 via new record label Dinosaur City.

‘Everything is Big’ is a tender, booming track where personal crises tangle with the wider calamities of the world. There’s a rattling urgency here, with swelling harmonies (provided by musician Nathalie Pavlovic), fuzzy guitar lines and contemplative vocals. The song asks: how do we determine what is trivial, and how does one establish personal hierarchies of importance? Russack knows that sometimes we can only be certain of our own small desires: “I just wanna see you around.”

The accompanying clip, directed by Stephanie Day (Peaches PRC, Jack Ladder) and filmed in Emma’s hometown, deals with the immensity and scale of the world; the sense of the vastness of existence and meaninglessness of it all. Starting on a desolate beach, Emma uses a recording microphone to try and pick up even the most minute signs of life. She hears nothing. She explores a vast quarry, still no one. Resigned, she sits on the beach and reads A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. As she reads, the camera starts slowly pulling up and up and up. Eventually, we're in outer space as the song keeps playing “I just wanna see you around”, which seems even more impossible now that we're in the universe, which is expanding by the way.

Emma shares, “Steph is my bestie and she suggested we make a clip together and it worked out that I was in Narooma at the time, so she and James Woods took some time out from their schedules to come down from Sydney and make something with me. It was all Steph’s vision, which I trust with every fibre of my being, and we ended up having a fantastic couple of days shooting on the beach and in a quarry. I love what she took from the lyrics - and the clip seems so true to what the song is about. Small things and big things and the enormity and insignificance of it all.”

When desire loses its direction – with no person or object to pin itself to – it has a strange tendency to turn us toward the past. We find ourselves surveying past infatuations and failed romances. Armed with the knowledge of hindsight, previous entanglements reconfigure and reveal themselves. Sometimes, we become privy to the true nature of our attraction, or learn the patterns that have played out across our romantic lives to which we have been blind. Nothing can be quite as bracing or mortifying.

Emma Russack would know. These reassessments and revelations stretch across About The Girl, her brilliant, searching sixth record, produced by Russack and long-time collaborator John Lee at Phaedra Studios. This is an album about longing’s impossible force, tackling how relationships both muddle and illuminate one’s sense of self. Russack says the record is partly inspired by the dissociations brought on by dating apps. “It’s about the funny experiences that happen when you’re untethered” she says, “I had these awful experiences and encounters, that made me also reflect on my past experiences with different people, romantic or otherwise.”

Often, Russack sings in a daze, trying to grasp the contours of memories that have blurred. But she hauls specificity back with hard-won vigour, pasting details together and creating new constellations of understanding. In the thrall of past experience, Russack’s songwriting reaches new heights; merging plain-spoken disclosures with mordant humour. History’s constant murmur is felt through the record’s spectral, spacious sound, full of elegant harmonies, heavily strummed guitar and ominous synths that reverberate and splutter.

Emma Russack was born in the coastal town of Narooma, NSW. She first gained traction as a teenager, belting out covers of Joy Division and Neil Young on her YouTube channel. Known and loved for beautifully spare, and oftentimes impish, records on loss and devotion, she has spent the past decade performing across Australia and Europe, performing at much-loved local festivals such as Meredith and Meadow, while scoring support slots alongside international touring acts including Julien Baker, Jens Lekman and Bonnie Prince Billy. Her five preceding records were nominated for the prestigious Australian Music Prize, and met with praise from media and radio across Australia, Europe and North America, including The Fader, Rolling Stone Magazine and FLOOD Magazine. She has also recorded several duet records with musician Lachlan Denton and plays in the group Snowy Band. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.

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