In the music industry, rawness is a commodity. Struggle and hardship alone are not enough. They have to be tapped into. They have to be shaped. This process of shaping is sometimes called art, but it also results in a product fit to be sold and consumed, however ragged, however scratchy it may seem. Some artists understand that they are trapped in this paradoxical bind, but they don’t necessarily know how to escape from it. Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain fall into this group. Others have successfully learned to laugh at it from the outside, using surreal humour as a distancing technique even as their music leans into the lo-fi. Think early Stephen Malkmus.
Sometimes a new artist emerges, a fresh voice with a fresh take on confession and self-examination, and causes you to sit up, take note and wonder which route she will end up pursuing. Such is the case with Rowena Wise, whose 2024 debut album Senseless Acts of Beauty was an object lesson in a kind of melody-savvy rawness. An impeccably packaged document of indie-folk vulnerability at first listen, it revealed darker depths with every listen. Here, it seemed, was someone who understood the formula and could work it from the inside, and could do so – crucially – without any evidence of cynicism.
Naarm/Melbourne-based Wise looks to expand on that impressive debut with Bad Things Feel Good*. The title’s asterisk is important – it introduces an element of doubt, reminds us that rules can and do have exceptions. It also tells us that Wise is cognisant of her own rawness and its limitations, that she can transcend it. Her way of transcending it is not through distance; she doesn’t pull the Malkmus trick of creating layers of absurdity between herself and her subject. She does quite the opposite, in fact. Quiet sincerity and intimacy are her calling cards. She relishes its spiky inner surfaces as much as its soft overwash. ‘Don’t believe what you’ve been told, you’re made of flesh, you’re made of blood, you are enough,’ she sings on Diamond In the Rough, a song where background instrumental swells and pained vocals are undercut by rough and ready percussion. The chorus achieves a rare, paradoxical feat: it’s intimate enough to fill a stadium.
Elsewhere, things are more stripped-back. The Anchor, a song about the crushing, debilitating nature of love, uses little more than a strummed acoustic guitar and Wise’s persuasive voice to create an enveloping soundworld. The simple, unaffected guitar of Opener Home In This World comes across like a latter-day Leonard Cohen, but the lyrics have a stark, self-reflective quality.
More Horizon has a satisfying percussive lope, and the minimal but muscular electric guitar takes its cues from the quieter end of post-grunge or alt-rock. Blood Ties is a more traditional rocker where the rawness is almost swampy, while No Angel has a hazy, medicated shimmer that opens out into a widescreen, country-rock chorus. Lyrically, Wise treads ground that might seem familiar – crumbling relationships, co-dependence – but she approaches her subjects with such freshness and honesty that she sheds new light on anything she sings about.
She also has the ability to move between swooping, soaring maximalism and spine-tingling intimacy. Sum of Two is a perfect example of the latter, a song where her every intake of breath is foregrounded, where every pluck of a guitar string feels like it’s in your living room or in your head. Similarly, listening to Unlearning of Love feels almost like eavesdropping, so close to the bone are its lyrical concerns. And then things suddenly get more businesslike when a bustling drum part elbows its way into the song, making space for a searing, distorted guitar. It makes for an intriguing change of pace.
‘I know I’ve made a mess, but it feels good,’ she sings on the title track, but in truth her vision is admirably lucid: the mess has been transmuted into something beautiful, something with a skillfully directed emotional sting. Wise has made no secret of the fact that much of Bad Things Feel Good* was informed by a period of poor mental health, and while that is apparent in the album’s lyrics, there is also a sense of renewal and maturation. The piano-based closing track, Days Ahead, has one eye on a better future even as it details a trail of emotional ruin. This is Wise showing us the bigger picture without losing sight of the small details. She does this throughout the album, juggling apparently contradictory elements and emerging with a set of songs that provide the perfect soundtrack to the contemporary emotional life.
Bad Things Feel Good* (August 7th, 2026) Beloved Records
Order Bad Things Feel Good* – https://rowenawise.lnk.to/badthingsfeelgood