It’s rinse and repeat every New Year according to Ali Barter on new single ‘January’, the third track pulled off her highly anticipated second album Hello I’m Doing My Best which will land October 18 via Inertia Music / [PIAS].
Her ode to New Years resolutions depicts the well-intentioned, yet largely unsuccessful attempts we all make at change come January 1st. “It seems like every year, January rolls around and I’m still trying to fix the same things as the year before. The older I get the more I realise that I don’t change, this is all I got. So fuck it.” says Barter. Indeed, some things never change, including Barter’s vocal elasticity; evidenced as she sends her breathtaking falsetto to dizzying heights and reels it back in with razor-sharp precision.
To accompany the single, Ali Barter has teamed up with director Anna Phillips (‘Ur A Piece of Shit’, ‘Backseat’) once again to create a stunning, one-shot visual. “The clip idea came from a line in another song off the record ‘Cocktail Bar’. The line is “Dumped out on the lawn again” and it’s about a time when I was drinking a lot. I thought it would be cool to paint this picture, in a scene. The clip is an anti-climax, a girl wasted at a party again, nothing much happens, but it’s beautiful and dull and she’ll probably be there next January 1st.” says Barter.
Hello, I’m Doing My Best follows Barter’s 2017 debut LP A Suitable Girl. A record that, by all accounts was critically and popularly acclaimed. Tone Deaf touted it as “an album that struck a nerve with Australia”, while Sydney Morning Herald backed her as a “star on the rise”. Ali Barter, however, wasn’t so sure. “The first record came out and for some reason I rejected it,” she says, listing the complaints she found with her own work: “it’s too polished and my voice is too high” being at the top of the list. Overcome with self-doubt, Barter pushed herself away from music, determined to never write another song.
But in the winter, a few months after the record’s release, she went out of town to clear her head, with her guitar for company. “Stuff started coming up and I couldn’t push it down,” she says, and despite feeling like she “wasn’t ready” for what these songs were saying, her and Dawson went about recording and testing the limits of her surprising new songs. She heard something in them she’d realised she didn’t need to fight anymore. “When we demoed them up, I was like, Oh, there I am. The thing I was pushing against was me“
Hello I’m Doing My Best is a sentiment most can relate to, and therein lies the undeniable pull of Ali Barter’s output. From her breakout single ‘Girlie Bits’ to recent cut ‘Ur A Piece Of Shit’ Barter spins sobering honesty through sugary pop songs, like a one-two punch of staunch self assurance and touching vulnerability, in a way that is so uniquely her own. On her method, Barter explains “I really connect to the idea that you can say something really controversial, but if you say it in a nice way people are more likely to listen to it.”
Since winning the triple j Unearthed competition and releasing her debut album A Suitable Girl in 2017, the former choir girl has enjoyed support at home from triple j, FBi Radio, The Australian, Rolling Stone and Tone Deaf, while further afield, Beats 1, Clash and The 405 have all thrown support behind the unconventional pop star. Barter has toured relentlessly, completing two sold out headline tours, countless festival slots and supported The Rubens, The War On Drugs, The Jezabels, Stevie Nicks, The Preatures, Chrissie Hynde and personal hero, Liz Phair.
Ali Barter
Hello, I’m Doing My Best
- Lester
- Ur A Piece Of Shit
- History Of Boys
- Big Ones
- Cocktail Bar
- January
- Backseat
- Magoo
- Are You Happy Now?
- This Girl
- I Won’t Lie
