It is not always the ones wearing the uniform of rebellion who are the most rebellious; a crowd of identikit punk acts conforming to the conventions of the outsider, alternative spirit are expressing their reactionary individuality a whole lot less than someone who can step back and create something against this tide entirely on their own terms. Leah Senior addresses this very thing on Softly Once Again, wherein she turns those Beatles-tinted pop inflections into a gentle but firm manifesto, permitting herself to follow her own instincts while wryly noting the glut of punk bands crowding Melbourne’s stages. The song’s lines sing “so many punk bands in this town, so little said, for all that sound…” as they sketch out her dilemma with disarming clarity: whether to hitch her wagon to the noise or trust the quieter, more deliberate voice she has cultivated. In doing so, she lays out a miniature version of the album’s wider preoccupation, weighing the pull of contemplative creative space against the demands of public expression, and it chimes with my own sensibilities, opting for softness over spectacle. And do not let that measured approach doubt her rebellious spirit; Leah has the stomach for a good fight. You will not find her music on Spotify, for example, but search her name there and you will encounter some eloquent text taking the platform to task, addressing its CEO by name and leaving the reader in no doubt about her feelings regarding the site and its practices.
Leah Senior’s path to Pt. Roadknight begins well before she settled into the sandstone shack in the regional seaside village Anglesea in Victoria, but that stretch of time in a summer coastal town gives the new album its pulse. After a decade moving through Australia’s folk circles and touring widely, finding herself on stages with Wilco, Iron & Wine, Jessica Pratt, Simon Joyner, and her long-running collaborators King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Leah reached a moment where distance from Melbourne’s creative bustle felt necessary. Signing with SPINSTER in the US, alongside Third Eye Stimuli at home, marked a widening horizon. Yet, the writing happened in a place where the horizon was literal, in the form of a quiet beach town that motioned between summer crowds and winter emptiness. Those contrasts seeped into the songs she drafted there, the bright days and bleak ones sitting side by side as Leah navigated her own mix of solitude, artistic freedom, and the unease of watching wealth tower over a community in crisis. The landscape’s grey skies, shifting seasons, and the dragonflies skimming a pond on Howard Eynon’s property turned the creative tap on for this record, the environment’s rhythms becoming the album’s internal clock. By the time she stepped into the studio to actually record her fifth record, that period of retreat and reckoning had conjured enough inspiration and revelations to form the backbone of this deep collection of songs, crafted in a retro fashion yet belonging entirely within the cultural landscape of 2026.
And it is indeed a wonderful album, overwhelmingly winning me over by leaning into a sound that, decades into my music listening experience, I do not appear ever to have enough of. That is the hazy fog of late sixties, early seventies folk rock recorded and played with a natural analogue texture that potently lends these songs a human touch they respond to so well. Some of the guitar phrases hark back to traditional folk song, but the sonic layering is unshackled by history; in fact, there are moments of guitar solo dissonance in Blossoms Of Spring that any modern psych band would gladly put their name to. Leah’s present-day lyrical reflections enhance the contemporary sheen; yes, there is a moment when she mentions “fair maidens,” but overall it is the Australian urban and rural landscapes and their populations that inform her. This leads me to another aspect of this music that is subtly different: that electric folk style is, for me, quite wintry; in the hands of Leah, however, the overall temperature is fairly warm and sunny, even on the Wicker Man-like hum of Winter. The jazz-inspired coda to this song also hints at a musical freedom at the heart of Senior’s work; she really could fly in any direction her muse takes her in the future. As a whole work, Pt. Roadknight turns its inward gaze outward, offering Leah’s reflections with a clarity of purpose. In songs like Mothersong, Zoë, and Part of the Crowd, her solitary moments become letters to the world beyond the coast, the introspection that bore them leading to strong connections. As she reminds us in Talk To Me, there is a fine line between focus and withdrawal, and this album walks it with rare grace.
Pt. Roadknight (June 19th, 2026) Spinster (US/UK) Third Eye Stimuli (ROW)
Bandcamp: https://leahsenior.bandcamp.com/album/pt-roadknight