ANNIE HAMILTON
ANNIE HAMILTON
STOP AND SMELL THE LIGHTNING
STOP AND SMELL THE LIGHTNING
Written by Juliette Salom (she/her)
Eora
Images by MACAMI
In the lead up to the release of her sophomore album, stop and smell the lightning, musician, artist, designer and one of the hardest working musos in the country, Annie Hamilton, catches up with Demure writer Juliette Salom to chat all things writing songs on the move, finding confidence in oneself and, of course, lightning bolts.
Can you blur your eyes just enough to let the light in?
It’s a line that comes between raspy breaths, among glistening cascades of waterfalling twinkles soaring through an atmosphere of night stars, anchored by none other than the angelic voice of Annie Hamilton. It’s a spur of the moment thought, punctuated by stream-of-consciousness observations. Metal in the sand / flickering fluorescence. Punctuated, also, by desires of how to exist. Following the feeling / I will take my chances / stop and smell the lightning. If Annie’s newest album, stop and smell the lightning, had to be put down to one thing, it’s this. This feeling right here. A hazy dreamscape, eruptions of emotions, evenings that spill over the seams of midnight. It’s the understanding that the moment you’re in is the turning point of everything else there is to come.
“I first wrote it when I was out walking the streets one night,” Annie says about seven storeys up, the song in question. “The chorus kind of came to me as I was walking. I walked home and sat down at the piano and fleshed out the chords and more of the melodies and wrote more verses.” Annie tells me it was just the other day that she was listening to voice memos she recorded as she was puzzling together the pieces of the track. “You can hear the melodies arrive,” she says. “You can hear me just playing around and then stumbling across lyrics.”
It’s a theme that is strewn across the entirety of Annie’s new album. stop and smell the lightning is a portal of arrival. Not to one particular place, exactly, or even one particular feeling. The notion of arrival feels both abstract and potent. It’s in the opening love-letter to nights spent flying around sideroads with the streetlight glow reflecting off the shine of eyes on on your mind. It’s in the dance anthem of the first night spent under disco lights after the grief of a breakup on without you. And, perhaps most obviously, it’s in the breath of fresh air as a clarity starts to settle like the dust of a past remembering itself for the sake of a future that has to be different, on stay my mind (arrival).
This arrival that Annie is within is undoubtedly the midpoint. A sophomore album that has been two and a half years in the making, stop and smell the lightning has had the singer-songwriter and multi-faceted artist in its grips since before Annie’s debut album, the future is here but it feels kinda like the past, was even released. “I started writing some songs while I was still making [the future is here] that just didn't feel like they fit in that world or in the story of that album,” Annie says. “And so, I just kept them up my sleeve.” She laughs at that, a glint in her eye suggesting that there’s probably a bunch more songs hiding up all the sleeves of every item of clothing she’s ever owned.
It pains me to hear her say it – as a longtime fan of Annie’s music – but her ability to kill her darlings and cull potential songs is clear proof that each move Annie makes when crafting a collection of music is in service of the body of art as a whole. And, consequentially, in service of the person that she is as an artist. “I never wanna make work that feels like I'm following a trend,” she says. “I never wanna put out something that doesn't feel like I really love it. And definitely with this album, I'm just like, I fucking love it. I can't wait to put it out. If I put it out and everyone hates it, I'm not gonna love it any less.”
The self-assurance that emanates from Annie when she talks about making music is the same contagious confidence you can hear all across the album. It’s a poise that has seen her grow as an artist, as a person, as a human being open to new experiences. Working with close friend and collaborator Jake Webb (Methyl Ethyl) on production, stop and smell the lightning is an album that Annie describes as “a time capsule of my last two and a half years.”
It may be her official sophomore album, adding to the self-titled EP in her discography alongside the future is here, but Annie also hints at a whole secret album that was written somewhere between the two. “It’s in a demo graveyard on a hard drive,” she giggles.
“I kind of had to cleanse the palate,” Annie continues. “I made all the heartbreak songs, got 'em out of my system. And then I was at this point where I was like, all I wanted to do was go out and listen to these like heartbreak bangers. I was like, I want ‘dance away the sadness’ songs.” Enter: stop and smell the lightning. “It's not a breakup album, it's a breakout album,” she says. “It's the next phase where you're going back out into the world and rediscovering joy and living your life and being like, oh my God, there's so much cool stuff out the other side.”
“So many doors opened and there were so many amazing experiences to be had that wouldn't have happened if I was still in that previous life phase.” This is the phase after the grief of a breakup; a phase that looks a lot like a turning point. The idea of joy pinpointed this moment in time for Annie and rose to the surface of the ocean of art she was creating. But joy and grief – and general human existence – is complex. No one lives in an emotional vacuum.
“The more I worked on it, the more I was like, it can't all be just big happy highs,” Annie says. “There are some lows as well. What goes up must come down. And so, I started to think of the album as being like a zigzag. Like a lightning bolt.”
“There're these big hyper produced, massive upbeat highs, and then the really delicate, fragile lows. That's what life is like, and it felt like it would've been inauthentic for me to only include the highs.” The “lows” on stop and smell the lightning, Annie clarifies, aren’t necessarily sad songs. “They're kind of like moments of reflection, or moments of realisation, or letting go.” They’re the moments of fragility that comes with deep breaths. Breaths that fuel the journey onwards, that breathe out the past like letting it go.
The dance of balancing the quiet, delicate moments and the all-encompassing anthems is heard most aptly on the coupling of two of the most complementary yet contrasting songs on the album – without you ~ prelude (departure) and without you. The first of these two is an ocean-soundtracked, paddling in the shallows piece that feels like a moment of knowing realisation. I went out for my first night without you / and I’m walking home and it all feels new. Friends’ laughter and the beep of pedestrian lights pile into the mix, creating a new world of unfelt feelings, the kind that can only be experienced in the aftermath of an old one.
While without you ~ prelude (departure) might be the calm peace that is feet at the seashore as the tide licks sand-strewn ankles, without you is the chaotic joy of diving right in. without you is one of the most visceral of ventures into the tide of new experiences across the album, crystallising in it the sheer intensity of all the feelings that comes after the turning. “My life isn't gonna end now that this is over,” Annie says about the song. “You can still be in love with someone, still really miss someone and still be heartbroken, while also feeling optimistic and hopeful. Those feelings can exist at once.”
“Across the whole album, I want that duality,” she continues. “I want to show that it's not black and white. All these feelings can exist simultaneously and that's what makes us human.”
While the music is masterful in its nuances and the songwriting superb in its ability to delve deep into the well of personal experience, there’s something else at play across stop and smell the lightning that can’t go without mentioning. The parts in which you can hear Annie wield her steadfast self-possession the loudest is in her ability to have some goddam fun.
The industrial-feminine-rage pop anthem that is slut era is underlined with satirical in-jokes and rolling of the eyes at the impossible tango of the Madonna-whore complex that women are expected to dance. DYNAMITE, the first single from the album, feels like a metaphorical middle finger in the air, polished off with a perfectly timed Legally Blonde reference. crush song’s first line is literally, I just want to have some fun.
Fun, Annie’s music seems to be saying, is underrated. It’s not just the fun of life-altering nights outs or forever-lasting romantic relationships that Annie is pinpointing, either. It’s the stories of midnights on rooftops leaning over railings, of sitting cross-legged on kitchen benches chatting shit with mates, of chasing the high and riding the low and then always chasing the high again.
seven storeys up – one of the most magical songs on the album – crystallises this feeling in a perfect three-minute-fifty-five moment of transcendental bliss. “It was a song that new lyrics and new verses just kept arriving,” Annie says. “It was taken from all these different moments, a lot of moments that I'd had with my friends, like being at house parties or going out and dancing or being at someone's house and sitting around the kitchen.”
“Just random moments with all these different people that felt like they all had this kind of energy, and you can't really describe how special they are 'cause they're so mundane. And that's what makes them so special.”It’s a vast song, with room to breathe around the lyrics, time to take in all the fleeting moments. “They're some of the favourite lyrics and melodies I've ever written,” Annie tells me. “The first half feels so floaty and dreamy. There’s so much space. It’s just letting the song be as it is.” The second half, I might add, lifts the listener up with it. Up beyond space and into a whirlwind of feeling that can only be described with the emotion it takes to feel it, to experience it, to be within it.
on your mind - DYNAMITE - without you prelude (departure) - without you -
on your mind - DYNAMITE - without you prelude (departure) - without you -
streetlights - crush song - slut era - stay my mind (arrival) -
streetlights - crush song - slut era - stay my mind (arrival) -
talk - from the hotel pool i draw a line - seven storeys up - jackhammers -
talk - from the hotel pool i draw a line - seven storeys up - jackhammers -
stop and smell the lightning marks more than one turning point for Annie Hamilton. It’s the start of a new chapter for the artist and the electric hazy-night dreamscape world she’s creating, but it’s also a world she’s crafted completely on her own. “I'm finally releasing this music that I've been working on for ages,” Annie says, “and I'm doing it fully independently, I own it all. I'm doing it on my terms, and it feels like it's resonating with people. Which is just so rewarding and such a cool feeling.”
Circling back to an earlier point in our conversation, it’s clear that the goal of Annie’s music is the work itself. Any success that comes in tangent with it seems insignificant to the wider, holistic vision she has for the universe she’s drawing up with her art. “I'm really proud of it. It feels like it's already a success that I finished it,” Annie says, laughing. “I'm kind of like, wait, I finished it, that's all I need. I’m just excited to start making the next one.” If previous trends are anything to go by, Annie’s no doubt already finished it.
You can hitch on the lightning bolt to Annie’s universe by following her on IG here.