Grief rarely follows a straight line, and on her debut album Spectacular Denial, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Anna Smyrk leans into that truth with striking clarity. Across eleven songs that shift between quiet introspection and surging indie-rock release, Smyrk captures the disorienting emotional terrain that follows loss, where love, memory and pain coexist in uneasy harmony. Her voice, at once delicate and assured, carries these stories with a disarming honesty that feels both intimate and expansive.
Written in the wake of her father’s passing, the record finds Smyrk turning inward, using songwriting as both a refuge and a form of reckoning. What began as a private act of processing soon revealed a wider resonance, with early live performances transforming the songs into shared spaces of reflection and connection. There is no neat resolution here. Instead, Spectacular Denial moves in waves, mirroring the unpredictable rhythms of grief itself.
From lo-fi indie influences to hushed, folk-leaning moments, the album showcases a songwriter unafraid to sit in complexity while still reaching for light.
To celebrate the release of Spectacular Denial, the rising artist Anna Smyrk has penned an exclusive track-by-track article for 1883 Magazine, delving into each song off the new album.
A note from Anna on the album
The album doesn’t go in a straight line from grief to acceptance, because that has not been my experience at all. It’s more like waves of big feelings, positive and negative, over time. So I wanted to record to reflect that. The songs range from hopeful to thoughtful to despairing and back again.
Making this album was both a balm and a trial. Being able to sing out my feelings was amazing, but also hard. There was more than one tear shed in the studio, that’s for sure. My band and the producer, Anna Laverty, were so generous and open to coming on this ride with me. I knew this was a record I had to make with people I trust, and I couldn’t have asked for a kinder crew.
‘Skin Thinner’
I wrote this song about trying to peel away the layers that I put up to protect my mind after my dad passed away unexpectedly. It’s a resolution to try to work through the shock and denial and be open to the world again.
Denial and staying numb can be a useful part of the process, it can protect you when you’re not ready to feel your feelings. But at some point, if you want to feel all the good stuff as well, you need to find a way to stay open and hold the painful stuff and the joyful stuff at the same time. At least, that’s been my experience!
‘Garden-Variety Grief’
This song is a kind of bittersweet celebration of resilience in the face of all the heavy stuff. After my dad passed away I was a mess, and I was looking around me and realising that everyone is carrying something, some grief, or trauma, or pain.
Grief is so isolating, but also so common. It’s everywhere. And somehow, we’re all still getting up every day, making jokes, chatting to mates, doing our laundry, just living lives. It’s extraordinary, and completely ordinary at the same time.
This track was definitely the most fun to record out of the album. There’s a moment at the end of the song where the band and I are just standing around a mic in the middle of the room screaming our heads off. It was super cathartic. (Check it out here)
I also loved filming the video. We really wanted to create this beautiful shot of all these lamps coming on around me in the dark. That ended up involving about 700 extension leads and shooting out in the cold until 4am, but I think it was worth it!
‘This is a Drill’
This is a Drill is a song about not being ready to feel my feelings. It’s about the strange, foggy state of denial, where everything feels a little unreal, like normal life is happening on the other side of a heavy curtain, like each day is a drill for the real thing.
‘Sit Down in My Shadow’
I wrote this song at a songwriting retreat in Sweden with my friend Luna Keller, a wonderful German songwriter. We were staying in this gorgeous Swedish forest, next to a glorious lake. But we were both in kind of a dark place, for different reasons. So we wrote this song about the disconnect that comes from feeling low when you’re in a beautiful place, surrounded by people having a good time.
‘The Future Conditional’
This is the grungiest moment on the album and one of my favourite ever songs to play live. I love that it’s a straight up rock song with a grammar reference in the title. It’s about thinking way too much about the future and forgetting to be where you are.
‘Keeping Up Is Bringing Me Down’
I knew I wanted a gnarly synth tone in this song. I like how it’s kind of harsh against the softness of the vocal layers. Producer Anna Laverty added in this repeating sound of my breath, played backwards, which is a kind of precursor to a lyric from another song from the record, Line by Line- “It’s one breath at a time.”
‘Crying in an Internet Cafe’
This song is about backpacking in my early 20s, about being far away from home and not knowing how to put my feelings into words. It’s one of the more irreverent moments of the record. There are a few funny little anecdotes in there, including an episode of food poisoning in Laos.
‘See It Everywhere’
I wrote the bridge for this song the night before going into the studio to record, and it turned out to be one of my favourite moments on the record, although I can’t seem to listen to it without crying.
Most of the album was recorded live with the band in the studio, but this is one track that we really built layer by layer. There were a few key elements I knew I wanted to include, like lots of vocals parts interplaying, but I didn’t have a clear vision of the final product in mind. So producer Anna Laverty and I just kept trying out different sounds and instrumentation until we arrived here.
‘This is Going To Get Worse’
I was listening to a lot of lofi indie rock when I wrote this one, bands like Alvvays and Slow Pulp. There’s also a reference to a children’s book that I loved as a kid- We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. I think there’s a perfect metaphor for grief in there- the idea that you can’t go under it, over it, or around it, you just have to go through it.
‘Line by Line’
I wrote ‘Line by Line’ in an airplane bathroom. I was heading home after a tour around Germany, feeling exhausted and really missing my dad, who had passed away a few months earlier. I watched a sad movie on the plane, then the chorus came into my head while the credits were rolling in the dark. I locked myself in the bathroom for a few minutes, singing quietly into my phone, and that was the seed of the song.
It’s a song of quiet introspection, an affirmation to take things as they come. I wrote it at a time when I was finally seeing some glimmers of light after a dark time. I hope people get a little bit of comfort from it.
The drum part that Holly Thomas wrote for this song is so good- intricate and driving, without taking up too much space. She also plays a huge mother of an orchestral gong in this song, which was fun.
‘I Don’t Believe in Heaven’
I wrote this song for my dad. It’s the hardest and the nicest song to play live, the moment when I feel closest to him.
Anna Smyrk’s debut album Spectacular Denial is out now.
Photography Michelle Grace Hunder
