New Zealand multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Sarah Mary Chadwick is not a new face to Melbourne’s music community. After spending a decade fronting the New Zealand formed grunge band ‘Batrider’, Sarah became tired of the collaborative requirements intrinsic to band life and shifted her focus to songwriting independently, drawing inspiration from ‘weird old New Zealand musicians’ and the way they ‘tinker away and work for decades for little to no commercial success’.
Six years and three solo records later – ‘Eating For Two’ (Bedroom Suck Records), ‘9 Classic Tracks’ (Siltbreeze) and ‘Roses Always Die’ (Rice Is Nice Records), Sarah will join fellow songwriters Homeshake, Jaye Bartell and Tim Cohen on Omnian Music Group’s label Sinderlyn to release her fourth solo record Sugar Still Melts In The Rain.
To listen to Sarah’s music is to be an observer to her thoughts on love, death and mental health. Sometimes this anguish bears itself in quiet moments of the record, but more often torment manifests at the break of Sarah’s voice as she sing-shouts painfully self-aware lyrics. Learning that Sarah’s songwriting is thoroughly autobiographical is perhaps more unnerving than the sexually deviant pornographic art that she creates to accompany her music.
Watch the official music video for ‘Sugar Still Melts In The Rain’ on YouTube.
“The doyenne of the disconsolate, Sarah Mary Chadwick is a wonder-fully cracked songwriter and musician to boot. Austere, indelicate and beautiful.” – Dynamite Hemmorrhage
Sugar Still Melts In The Rain (USA) by Sarah Mary Chadwick