Anna Smyrk’s debut album Spectacular Denial out March 20

Anna Smyrk’s debut album Spectacular Denial out March 20 via Community Music

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – Community Music is very pleased to announce that Anna Smyrk will be releasing her debut full length recording Spectacular Denial on March 20th.

Presave ‘Spectacular Denial’ HERE

Confessional, hook-filled and devastatingly beautiful, the 11-track album moves seamlessly between grief and love, pain and hope. Fusing indie-rock with tender alt-folk intimacy, it spotlights Smyrk’s exceptional songwriting and her delicate yet commanding vocals.

Spectacular Denial was produced by Anna Laverty (Courtney Barnett, Angie McMahon) and much of the album was recorded live in the studio. The new album sits sonically in a rich space between indie, alt-pop, and folk. Early singles have been warmly received by tastemakers including John Kerr at BBC Radio who called Anna ‘one of Australia’s most compelling emerging artists’ and Roddy Hart at BBC Scotland who pinned Smyrk as “an antipodean artist doing great great things.”

The past two years have seen Smyrk tour across North America, Europe and Australia, with official showcases at SXSW, Folk Alliance International and NXNE. She has toured non-stop, sharing stages with the likes of Birds of Tokyo, Strands of Oak, Tim Rogers and Bachelor Girl, performing at some of Australia’s finest festivals. Her 2023 EP Cortisol and Blue Light (recorded in Nashville with Jake Finch and Collin Pastore of boygenius/Lucy Dacus) received worldwide acclaim, charted on US college radio and earned playlisting on MTV.

After losing her father, Smyrk turned to songwriting as a means of navigating her grief -something that had always come naturally to her. “Music is tightly woven through my memories of my dad. When I was 13, he taught me to play a couple of chords on his old acoustic guitar, and that week I wrote my first song,” she shares.

Originally, she had no intention of releasing these deeply personal reflections, but it soon became clear that others needed to hear them just as much as she needed to write them. “I’ve played some of these songs live and it feels like a balm. I’ve loved hearing how they’ve helped people remember, feel and be seen.”

“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.”

Spectacular Denial track list: