Arabic version: آمي شارك تتخلى عن إنتاج البوب لصالح ألبوم رابع مبسّط
Amy Shark has moved away from the big-pop sound that marked much of her career to release a fourth album, Soft Pop, built largely from vocals and acoustic guitar and recorded with producer Dann Hume.
According to The Guardian, the Gold Coast singer who found mainstream success after her track Adore was played on Triple J and went five times platinum faced a period where she stopped writing after 2024’s Sunday Sadness. Her husband and manager, Shane Billings, booked a block of studio time with Hume in the UK and gave her a month to write an album’s worth of songs, a deadline that pushed her back into songwriting and away from frequent co-writers.
The paper reports that Shark deliberately stripped back the arrangements, ditching drums and big-pop production in favour of pared-back tracks that leave little more on some songs than her voice and an acoustic guitar. Small, raw moments were preserved on the record — for example, a false guitar start captured on the album closer, Singapore Noodles — and the songwriting draws on old flames, friendship fallouts and elements of her marriage.
The profile traces Shark’s career arc from about 15 years of struggling in music, through the surprise success of Adore and a subsequent major-label bidding war, to the pressures of sustaining a career a decade on from that breakthrough. It notes her role as a judge on Australian Idol and records her comments about the campaign by musicians to resist government moves seen as ceding creative copyright to big tech, including concerns about large language models scraping Australian music without consent.
Song titles mentioned in the report include The Biggest Dick and Not Old Enough to Drive, alongside Singapore Noodles. The Guardian also describes how Shark took charge of the album’s aesthetics, designing the fluffy album cover herself with fabric, scissors and glue, and saying the process made her feel ‘‘like an indie artist again’’ even while on a major label.
Soft Pop is out on 24 July.
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