Annie Hamilton
Today, adored Eora/Sydney-based musician, visual artist and designer Annie Hamilton unveils her long-awaited debut album, the future is here but it feels kinda like the past, available on digital and vinyl formats through [PIAS] Australia. The release is accompanied by visualisers for each of the album tracks.
Obsessed with memory, dream worlds, fantasies and parallel realities, the future is here but it feels kinda like the past is a transportive, mystical journey that traces the contours of a balmy, high summer night, from the muggy, red-dirt afternoons that give way to electric blue twilights, through the navy-black nights sporadically, breath-takingly lit up by the whip of treacherous forked lightning, dissolving into warm, fuzzy mornings that sit perched on the window-sill of reality, another day. Sonically and thematically, the future is here but it feels kinda like the past lives in these listless hours of liminal consciousness, a self-contained, through-the-looking-glass universe where time becomes elastic, memories blur imperceptibly into one another and seeds of deep emotional truth come to you in surreal, warped imagery.
Synthetic yet raw, polished yet organic, digital yet gritty, Annie Hamilton’s debut studio full-length hangs suspended in time, cast between a past that is irrecoverable and a future that is seemingly never arriving. Maybe this promised future will never arrive, but, then again, maybe we don’t want it to anyway - maybe we want something else. Maybe, as so many did throughout the pandemic, we would rather turn backwards towards nostalgia, elsewhere towards escapism.
“It’s about the passing of time,” explains Hamilton, “how sometimes it flies by and sometimes it drags on forever and we’re always looking ahead wanting something more or wallowing in nostalgia, stuck in a past that probably wasn’t as good at the time as we remember it… the sense that the grass is always greener. The sense that there is never enough time to do everything that we want to do, or the feeling that we should have done more with the time that has already passed.”
PRAISE FOR ANNIE HAMILTON
“[O]ne of Australia’s best debut albums of the year”
The AU Review (Album of the Week, 4.5*)
“The Sydney artist’s debut album captures anxiety and turmoil with vivid, textured dream pop”
NME Australia (4*)
“Deft indie pop with a crackle of electricity in its veins, 'Electric Night' is a pointed, immediate, immaculate finessed return from a talent to watch.”
Clash Magazine (Track of the Day)
“... [A]nnie's music is seriously underrated. this has it all."
Declan Byrne, triple j
“She finds the extraordinary in everyday life, and creates beautiful, emotionally-rich indie tunes to explore this wonder… Hamilton has a knack for making music that is at once hugely personal and completely universal”
Purple Sneakers
“[E]verything Annie Hamilton has done since feels like a move you'd expect from someone amongst the future of Australian pop”
Pilerats
