Solo Career Shares ‘Spring Drills’; Debut Album Interior Delirium Out July 11 Via Dinosaur City

Solo Career, the beguiling bedroom-pop project of Body Type’s Annabel Blackman today shares ‘Sprill Drill’. The new track arrives a week ahead of the release of Solo Career’s debut album Interior Delirium, due Friday, July 11 via Dinosaur City.

‘Spring Drills’ is a bouncing new wave song stripped back to its brittle bones, poking fun at the inescapable building developments that riddle both the city and the suburbs, causing endless racket. As Blackman sings: “The spring drill sings / spirals through the window / And every cell of your being / wants to jump out the window”.

Interior Delirium, the debut album from Solo Career, is a glorious and sly synth pop record about the absurdity of identity – how we perform for others and ourselves, the puppetry that plays out across culture, and the freak impulses that startle our sense of self. It’s fitting for a project that was borne from musician Annabel Blackman’s interest in the uncanny and reflective possibilities of persona. “The album revolves around awkwardness, earnestness, gripe-picking, lustful stewing, play and self-deprecation” says Blackman. If her first solo EP The Sentimentalist (2021) was a dreamy strut, Interior Delirium is an unruly waltz, where foggy, late-night longing merges with stomping, hilarious, cyborg satire.

Interior Delirium was made in-between tours and sessions for Blackman’s group Body Type, and served as a counterpoint to playing and writing in a band. She was able to explore a radically different mode of making music – where she was free to obsess and fixate, and let experimentation and imperfection be. As Blackman puts it: “Solo Career is part control freak, part embellished mess.” The album was performed, recorded, and mixed entirely by Blackman, and marks the release of songs that she’s been tinkering with for many years.

“I’d pick up an instrument, make a blip or blop and follow the thread until a song took shape,” says Blackman. “I started one of the songs almost ten years ago, picked it up and finished it 6 years later, played it at shows for a couple years, and then got so tired of working on it by myself that I just let the jagged edges be, because polished stuff isn't for me anyway.”

Lead single ‘Venus on Speed Dial’ is a synth-driven road song about the discombobulations of desire, and how wanting someone can so often come at the expense of your own personhood: “This one is dedicated to being messed around by someone and going a bit loopy, and the experience of morphing yourself into whatever you think someone might like you to be,” says Blackman. The song revels in this claustrophobia, with distorted synths, fuzzy guitars and Blackman’s disaffected drawl ("What's your ideal/ What’s the appeal”), which swaddles the song in both humour and tenderness.

In Interior Delirium, alienation is the presiding texture of modern life, manifesting in the most ridiculous way. ‘Neo Soul Jazz Afternoon’ is a slow-burning dream-pop ballad, which discusses the dullness of easy listening music that has taken over shopping malls and offices. ‘Is That U’, a wry rock song about women going to extreme lengths to look ageless and exactly like one another, brimming with dark, hilarious imagery: flesh being hacked off, g-string seams, and a “saturday rhinoplasty with my sister”.

How can one stave off the dread? On Interior Delirium, Blackman gives us a tart tasting platter of what’s on offer. ‘Spenda’, released last month alongside a visual masterpiece courtesy of acclaimed artist, Matthew Griffin, is crazed, robotic, electro-pop (replete with jagged guitars and vocals pitched so high they mimic a kid having a temper tantrum) about the agony and addiction of online shopping. “It’s a sad thing when you’re caught in the futility of trying to buy someone a present,” says Blackman. But despite the song’s mechanical bent, there is a hidden layer of sweetness – it's really a love song about hoping a gift will embody all your affection for someone (“I want to buy you everything,” as Blackman coos). ‘Beta’ is a buzzing, lo-fi synth song about the allure of the beta blocker: “it’s this gag about taking beta blockers and then becoming some like, hardcore Alpha Dog” says Blackman. If all else fails, you can, like Blackman’s father, go see Avatar eight times at the cinemas, which she tenderly chronicles in the sauntering ‘Avatar’ (featuring Boba Lego AKA Oscar Sulich of Eternal Dust), something of a spiritual sequel to her 2021 track ‘Movie’.

But despite all these endless alienations and futile cures, connection is still found and fought for. ‘GWD’ is a pounding, fuzzy anthem to friend and Body Type member Georgia Wilkinson-Derums (“if she likes it I know it’s good”). The album ends with the lush and atmospheric ‘Bed Knot’, an ode to Blackman’s boyfriend’s bed hair in the morning. But it’s also about entanglement – a kind of euphoria that can sometimes stifle. “It’s that feeling of being lovingly trapped,” says Blackman “being totally wrapped up in each other.” Interior Delirium has a similar enveloping charm: it’s a beguiling and twisty record, full of great, scrappy pleasures and droll affection.

Since the release of her debut EP The Sentimentalist via Dinosaur City in 2021, Solo Career has been met with critical acclaim from PAPER Magazine, NME, KEXP, WFMU and community radio across Australia. Her song ‘Movie’ was featured in Fader’s Best Songs of 2021, and her EP The Sentimentalist was included in The Guardian’s Best Australian Albums of 2021. ‘Venus on Speed Dial’, the first single from her upcoming album, was added to rotation at FBi Radio and RTR, charted at 4ZZZ, and featured on Rolling Stone Australia’s as ‘Song You Need to Know’. It’s accompanying Gus Macleod-directed music video featured as rage’s ‘Wild One’. Solo Career’s thrilling live sets – where Blackman combines the humour and theatrics of cabaret with her stylish, singular synth-pop – has seen her support Julia Jacklin, The Hard Quartet, Gum and Springtime, among others.

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