Looking up into the rear-view mirror, she checks for ghosts, but all she sees is the horizon. Everywhere she looks, all she sees is a constancy of the promising of something to come. Violet sunset skies and bats hanging from powerlines; they’re marks of the future, a future that feels kind of like the past.
The cyclical nature of time isn’t exactly the focal point of musician/designer/artist Annie Hamilton’s new album, but also, when isn’t it? The Sydney local’s album – fittingly titled the future is here but it feels kinda like the past – is an array of ethereal vocals intertwined with cascading instrumentation and torrential waves of evocative poetry. The eleven-song track list is interspersed with thoughts on loneliness, desire, memory, and also some hope. Speaking to me Brisbane airport, about to fly to Darwin to play a festival with Jack River, Annie tells me that she’s always had an interest in the forces of memory and nostalgia. “I’ve always been fascinated by the human tendency to romanticize the past, to sink into nostalgia, to let how warped sense of memory get the better of us.”
On the opening track, Providence Portal, Annie tells us that she’s driving to the coast, the speed and the road doing little to make her feel less like she’s in-between the in-between. And whether she means to or not, this image of her driving, in what my imagination – taking some creative freedom – draws up as a rusted, paint-peeling late-90s Hyundai Getz, windows down, the purple of the sunset dripping from the skyline, feels like an apt demonstration of the feeling I imagine she’s trying to describe, both in this song and throughout the rest of the album. It’s the feeling of heading toward something new, of getting there and feeling the same. “The concept of ‘moving’ has always popped up in my writing,” Annie tells me, “Both literally and metaphorically.” Always on the move, travelling around the country like a typical touring musician, Annie says the imagery of the road trip that surfaces throughout the album is inspired by real places and real moments. “I really wanted to paint a picture of a kinda surreal dream world with hints of Australiana, but somewhere that everyone could picture as someplace they knew.” The familiarity of nostalgia that proliferates across the eleven tracks is of no accident – the feeling of universal wistfulness one of complete design.
It should be maybe unsurprising then that listening to Annie’s new album was indeed a venture into personal nostalgia for me. I was freshly nineteen and among the throes of unrequited love when I first stumbled across Annie Hamilton. Her 2018 debut single Fade, a portrait of unfading hope and forever patience set against the rolling hills of desire, was little less than a knife straight to the guts of nineteen-year-old me. With an EP and array of singles that have peppered the artist’s discography in the years since, the black and blues of my internal organs were only just beginning to heal, just as Annie drops a whole album of ethereal heart-wrenching bangers.
We’re a little further down the road now – of Annie’s career, of my youth – and the themes are somewhat changing. The waiting is over, abandoned even, and the force with which she wants to move on is driving the album home. “Just want you to know that I don’t care, I’ll let you go when I get there. I’ll let you go,” Annie sings on Providence Portal. She might not know where she is, or where she’s going for that matter, but the idea of moving on, of giving up on waiting, surfaces as a kind of evolution from the girl we hear on Fade.
I can’t help but feel the parallels projected upon me as I listen to the future is here, driving around northside, backdropped by a purple sky. Patience is no longer exponential, time no longer infinite. It’s easy to read into music and lyrics and see a somewhat distorted version of yourself reflected back to you, but yourself all the same. Annie, however, isn’t opposed to this personalised-specific reading of her art. “I hope that when you listen to my music, you can find your own story in it,” she tells me. “I think that sometimes the tiniest most specific moments can be the most universal.”
There’s an underlying tide of hope that moves through the album, it dances back and forth but ultimately moves forward. I think it’s in that that I can see the nineteen-year-old lovelorn girl; I can hear her and feel her when I let the future is here play on loop on my drive back home.
Annie Hamilton’s music does that rare thing of intertwining nostalgia with originality. She doesn’t ignore the past, doesn’t refuse what’s come before her, but embraces it all to create something wholly new. “The more I wrote, the more I realised I was exploring these themes of time, memory, fantasy, nostalgia, anxiety about the future, which in turn made me want to write about them even more.” And thank god that she did.
the future is here but it feels kind of like the past is out now. Jump in your car and drink up a purple sky and put Annie on loop, only if you wish to revel in the nostalgia just right.