Amy Shark, an Australian singer-songwriter and judge on Australian Idol, is releasing her latest album, Soft Pop, on 24 July. The album marks a significant creative shift for the artist, who spent 15 years pursuing music before achieving commercial success with her 2016 hit Adore, which went five times platinum and led to a major record label deal.
In a recent interview, Shark reflected on the challenges of sustaining a music career beyond the initial breakthrough phase. She acknowledged the difficulty of remaining relevant as an established artist, noting that maintaining success requires different skills than achieving initial recognition. The artist expressed frustration with aspects of fame, describing it as involving public entitlement, constant scrutiny, and pressure to comment on issues beyond her expertise. She also addressed concerns about copyright protections for musicians in the context of large language models and artificial intelligence.
Shark’s creative process for Soft Pop involved a deliberate departure from her previous work. After completing her 2024 album Sunday Sadness, she experienced creative fatigue and initially stopped writing. Her husband and manager Shane Billings arranged a month-long studio session with producer Dann Hume in the UK to reinvigorate her songwriting. The time constraint and change of environment proved effective, prompting Shark to explore untold stories from her personal life, including relationship dynamics and friendship conflicts.
The resulting album features a stripped-back production approach, emphasizing Shark’s vocals and acoustic guitar over the drums and pop production of her earlier releases. The artistic direction represents a conscious effort to sound different from her previous work and recapture the creative satisfaction she experienced early in her career. Shark also took an active role in designing the album’s aesthetics, creating the cover art herself using craft materials, which she described as a return to working with an independent artist’s mindset.