Emily Lubitz
“Emily's exquisite, brushed-velvet vocal conjures a steady neck-hair raising waltz” - The Age
“Strikingly assured” - Rolling Stone Australia
Very few artists can cradle your heart in their hands while they kick your ass, but after more than a decade touring with critically acclaimed indie-folk darlings Tinpan Orange, Emily Lubitz is striding out on her own. The six-foot tall frontwoman with the gossamer voice has combined forces with Freyja Hooper on drums and Winona Miller on bass to create a new, darkly romantic vision.
With that timeless, aching quality that only the great voices have, Lubitz is every singer’s favourite singer, a captivating live performer who has won the hearts of audiences around the world, and yet she is more priestess than popstar, creating her own iconography that sears itself into the listener’s imagination.
Lubitz tells us stories about everyday things, but her voice transfigures them into works of beauty, like a messy bedroom suffused with golden morning light: “Sometimes we just need to pretend things are better than they are. Remember how it used to be. Sometimes we share pain that seems bottomless and we can only acknowledge it in a glance, while we try to keep it together, get the kids to bed, share a beer and put a record on.”
Lubitz is a veteran of the scene, having performed on some of the world’s biggest stages and collaborated with the likes of Paul Kelly, Martha Wainwright, Clare Bowditch and the album she recorded with old friend Mama Kin, and yet her solo work is imbued with the raw energy of a breakthrough artist.
Wandering through the material on Begin Again (2022) one is often surprised by commonplace images from domestic life that rear up out of the darkness, saturated by a strange poetic force. This sense of the everyday uncanny, and of the magic behind the veil of suburbia, is the arrow in a technicolour musical bow.
With the super-fun creativity of her all-grrrl rhythm section behind her, Lubitz prowls the stage with the gravitas of a giant Edith Piaf stalking through a post-apocalyptic Laurel Canyon, with her friends from East Brunswick in tow.