The Australian singer-songwriter confronts the most uncomfortable versions of herself on her third album, transforming personal turmoil into a deeply human meditation on accountability, healing, and hope.
What happens when the hardest person to forgive is yourself?
For Sydney-based singer-songwriter Odette, the answer isn’t necessarily found in grand revelations or dramatic moments of redemption. Sometimes, it exists in the quiet realization that life has become ordinary again—and that ordinary life might be the greatest gift of all.
Her third album, Blink, out November 6 via Beloved Records, is an intimate examination of shame, emotional volatility, fractured relationships, and the complicated process of rebuilding a life after a period of profound personal upheaval.
Produced alongside Kiah Gossner, the record began taking shape in 2022, when Odette was emerging from an especially difficult chapter of her life. Rather than attempting to construct a flattering narrative of recovery, she approached the album with a willingness to acknowledge contradictions, mistakes, and the uncomfortable reality that suffering doesn’t necessarily absolve us of the pain we cause others.
That tension is particularly evident on “Don’t,” a sweeping, confessional track built around crescendoing strings, piano, and percussion.
Written about someone who was once deeply important to her, the song reflects on a friendship affected by a period in which Odette struggled with her mental health and acknowledges having hurt people she loved.
But rather than asking for forgiveness or attempting to rewrite the past, “Don’t” becomes something quieter: an expression of enduring affection for someone who is no longer part of her life.
Across Blink, Odette moves between the soulful vulnerability of “AAAH!,” the confrontational spoken-word delivery of “Watch Me Go,” and arrangements that draw from baroque pop, jazz, R&B, and piano-led balladry.
The result is a record that refuses to make difficult experiences sound uniformly beautiful. Moments of tenderness coexist with abrasive textures, emotional restraint gives way to explosive expression, and self-reflection becomes inseparable from a growing awareness of the world beyond her own experiences.
Born in Bath, England, and raised in Sydney, Odette has long approached music as a form of emotional communication. Following her debut To a Stranger and its successor Herald, her distinctive combination of spoken-word poetry, melodic experimentation, and candid songwriting has earned her platinum and gold certifications and ARIA Award nominations.
With Blink, however, her relationship with songwriting feels particularly personal.
We spoke with Odette about the difference between guilt and accountability, the limitations of confessional songwriting, the strange beauty of emotional discomfort, and why the greatest transformation sometimes arrives without any sense of spectacle.
In Conversation With Odette
“Don’t” feels less like an accusation toward someone else and more like an attempt to reckon with the person you were inside that relationship. What was harder to write about: the pain you were experiencing at the time, or acknowledging the pain you may have caused?
Honestly neither. I don’t think “Don’t” causes serious pain for me. It’s a release of pain, expectations and an acceptance of what’s happened. I wrote this song because I have a deep love inside me for people that are no longer in my life and I wanted to honour that.
Shame often makes us want to hide certain versions of ourselves, whereas songwriting asks you to put them somewhere other people can see them. What allowed you to finally approach a period of your life you had previously been hesitant to turn into music?
I’ve always transmuted my pain into something else through music, that’s why I started writing when I was little. It was a way for me to articulate myself and process things that I hadn’t fully come to understand without the power of writing.
Nothing about my process has changed or morphed save new avenues and techniques of music-making. I’ll be writing about my experiences until I die and then maybe even after.
There’s a tendency in confessional songwriting to make ourselves either the victim or the hero of the story. On Blink, you seem willing to occupy much more uncomfortable territory. How important was it to make a record where you weren’t always asking the listener to side with you?
I’m not thinking about any of this when I’m writing. I’m not trying to win people or frame things in a certain way, maybe subconsciously without my realising, but not overtly.
I just want to say something as honest as possible because I know despite everything that my experience matters and has a lot to offer other people who may be suffering in similar ways.
It’s hard to be alive and no one is perfect. We all have something we’re not proud of. It’s about how we move forwards and the choices we make to repair and heal and lead better lives.
“Don’t,” “Watch Me Go” and “AAAH!” express emotion in radically different ways—from reflection to confrontation to something almost beyond language. Did you find yourself needing different musical forms for different kinds of emotional release?
I think that’s probably accurate. Yes. I needed to collage things together to get it right.
I hope it’s not too much of a mangled frankenstein, but that’s why I have Kiah. He and I worked together to paint this wonderful universe and despite the differences I find it really sings to everything I was going through at the time.
Blink began taking shape during a period when you were trying to recover from an extremely volatile chapter of your life. At what point did making the album stop feeling like documentation of that period and start feeling like evidence that you had moved beyond it?
This is a really wonderful question, thank you.
Once we finished the title track Blink, which wasn’t until the very end of the record process. I had just reached over a year sober from alcohol and I was reflecting on how much I’ve grown up and looking around at my apartment and at my friendships and my partner and my cat and just knowing I can live this normal life I am cherishing every second of it.
You describe transforming overwhelming experiences into something beautiful and healing, but beauty can sometimes make difficult experiences easier for an audience to consume. Did you ever resist making these songs too beautiful because you wanted some of their discomfort to remain intact?
Yes actually! There are lots of times Kiah and I intentionally led into the ugly, jarring, not-so-nice sounds. I personally think they’re beautiful.
I think ‘Seahorses’ is a good example – my vocal is jarring it’s not breathy and airy. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t an airy, dreamy, comforting presence on a lot of this record but then there are times when I am.
It really just differs based on the meaning of the song and what I’m saying.
Your music moves between piano balladry, spoken word, baroque pop, jazz and R&B without settling comfortably into one language. Do you think that restlessness reflects something about the way you experience emotion itself?
Yes I think I am a naturally restless person, hence all the problems and situations. Channeling it into music is very soothing to me.
My friend Damian Taylor, who produced To A Stranger and Herald, once told me he thought of me as one of those thermal images of a person, changing colours all the time.
I’m coming into a new period of my life where I’m able to harness that energy in a more productive way. I’ll always be a rapid fluctuator but it can be a power, not always debilitating, despite it sometimes being so.
Blink contains titles like “Godsink,” “Cocaine Zoetrope,” “Reverence,” “Heaven Help Me” and “Blink,” which suggest a world concerned with perception, faith, memory and altered states. What ideas began connecting these songs once you realized they belonged to the same album?
There are a whole bunch of things that went into this album, some which are hard to talk about because I’m a good talker but I’m better at writing songs about it.
The main idea for me is this image I had in my head of everything being inside a giant sink, just going down the drain and all of us holding onto each other as we experience it.
There’s a lot of fear at the core of this record but the actual making of it was powered by hope and an undeniable power that I don’t know how to name.
It’s a terrifying time to be aware and awake and that’s coming from someone who isn’t even on the frontlines of humanity’s violent conquests.
It’s hard to feel like there’s hope so I guess these songs were an exercise in creating hope in myself to change my own life and I want to share that with people. We’re more powerful than we think.
You’ve described music as something that helped you endure difficult moments from a young age. Has your relationship with that idea changed now that you’re the person making songs that may become someone else’s way of enduring something?
Music started as a way for me to communicate to my parents. I used to come home from school and have really loud, intense meltdowns because I was just keeping everything in all day and getting home and releasing it.
Music became a safe and cathartic way for me to do that. Music will always be that for me. To know that it resonates with other people is a really wonderful bonus.
The album is described as being about becoming more aware of the world around you, but much of it also involves looking very closely at yourself. By the time you reached the final song, “Blink,” what had you learned to see that you couldn’t—or perhaps didn’t want to—see when you began the record?
I was very self-indulged and self-pitying when I started spending time in Kiah’s studio. Sometimes I do hear moments of that on this album but I hold a lot of love and compassion for myself.
I was in an excruciating amount of pain and for a long time I didn’t know what to do with it and all kinds of terrible things happened.
When we truly finalised this record, which was only at the beginning of this year, I felt weird. I still feel weird.
I feel like when you’re going through it and fighting just to stay here, it feels like the destination will be grandiose and then it isn’t.
It feels like arriving at a bus stop and knowing that it’s just a short walk home to where I live and it’s a gentle feeling.
It’s not profound or intense or life-alteringly magnanimous on the surface but I’ve learnt that this is what it’s all about.
I’ve learnt a lot but my biggest lesson learned in finishing this album has revealed itself plainly as just existing.
I’ve got the sentimentality of a 100 year old woman now that I’ve come back from the dredges of the bog. It’s nice.
There is something profoundly moving about Odette’s refusal to frame recovery as a triumphant transformation.
Throughout Blink, she acknowledges the messiness of being human without suggesting that vulnerability automatically makes someone virtuous, or that artistic expression can undo the consequences of the past.
Instead, the album becomes a testament to the possibility of change without spectacle.
The person who began writing these songs in 2022 isn’t quite the same person who finished them. Yet the difference isn’t necessarily measured in dramatic revelations or declarations of rebirth.
It’s measured in friendships, a home, a partner, a cat, and the ability to appreciate the quiet rhythms of everyday existence.
And perhaps that’s the most radical idea at the heart of Blink: after everything we’ve endured, and everything we’ve had to confront about ourselves, simply being alive can be enough.
Odette’s third album Blink is out November 6 via Beloved Records, featuring “Don’t,” “Watch Me Go,” and “AAAH!”
Photography: Carl Os.
Blink — Tracklist
- Godsink
- Are You Really Having Fun?
- Watch Me Go
- Gills
- Cocaine Zoetrope
- Cold Interim
- Reverence
- I Hate
- Susie
- Don’t
- Seahorses
- Heaven Help Me
- AAAH!
- Blink
