Words and photos by Annie Barber.
Joining the call from her home in Sydney, Australia, singer Annie Hamilton is bathed in a summer evening glow, as she recounts a chaotic but momentous year.
Last year, she released her sophomore album ‘Stop & Smell The Lightning’, which she says was a “pretty massive highlight”. She notes that making the album wasn’t plain sailing, but that’s “what makes it interesting, or probably what makes, I think, good art”. She recorded the album over two and a half years before releasing it, writing, demo-ing and recording “sporadically”. She says that recording in Western Australia with Jake from Methyl Ethel entailed “this process where every few months, I’d go over to Perth and have this intense, creative time, and then I’d come back home or go on tour and have some space from it”. Despite taking months at a time away from working in the studio, she found this to be a good thing: “[It] allowed me the space to actually reflect on it. I think having that space away from it made me realise that I didn’t need to keep working and overwork things… and then I just thought, fuck it. That’s it. They’re actually perfect as they are, and if I kept working on them, I would probably ruin them”.
Releasing her album was hard work, but she says that she learned a lot, and she’s really proud of it: “I’d been working on it for so long… and it was also the first body of work that I’ve ever released fully independently”. When she first held the vinyl, she says that it felt like “tangible proof of the last three years of work”. However, touring is her favourite part of what she does: “I just love it. I love meeting new people. I love going to new places. I love performing. I love finding other bands to choose as my support acts, and watching them, it’s just so cool. I think you realise that real life communities are so powerful. Everything now is so centred on online communities and going viral… but you actually only really need like 30 people in a room who really care to have a transcendental life altering experience with live music”.
Hamilton spent November and December on the road, first at home in Australia, and then around the UK. She says that touring “was amazing”, pinpointing the show she played in her hometown, Sydney, as one of her favourite nights of the tour, “I had a lot of friends and family there. It was the last show of the tour, so it felt really special… the songs and the album had been out long enough that people were starting to know [them]”. She says that Glasgow and Edinburgh were some of her “favourite shows of all time”. She credits this to how relaxed they felt, saying “those two shows just felt so intimate and almost like I was just in my lounge room with a bunch of friends, and I could just chat and tell stories… they were so special”. She played the Australian shows with a full band, but played solo at her UK shows. To her, playing with a band creates a “massive, energetic buzz” and lets her play the songs how they “should sound”. Although she loves both, she says that playing on her own allows her more freedom: “[It’s] a different way of playing the songs, and I feel like I treat the set and the songs differently, and I lean into the singer songwriter, storytelling aspect of it more. They’re like, the two opposite ends of the spectrum”.
Earlier in the year, Hamilton toured Australia with American indie-rock band The National. When she talks about the tour, she’s smiling from ear to ear. “That was the dream tour. It was such a highlight and such a bucket list thing, and I would very happily do it again”, she says laughing. She played her opening set solo, which she says was quite natural: “I am constantly sitting at home playing guitar and singing. That’s literally what I’ve been doing all day today… I feel like I could do it in my sleep”. After she’d been on stage, she watched The National’s set every night. She says that “it was like a master class” on how to write, perform, and “make, a fucking amazing, captivating, energetic live show, night after night”.
As well as having a career in the music industry, Hamilton has her own fashion line, which is sustainably and ethically made. These are things which she feels very passionate about: “The fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world. There are so many negative impacts that the fashion industry has on the planet and on people. It’s so depressing when you think about it, because the rate that we’re buying clothes and consuming clothes is just going up and up and up”. She highlights that fast fashion is “so commonplace”, and that to buy sustainably and ethically “you almost have to go out of your way to do that”. Having studied Sustainable Design at university, Hamilton says she’s always tried to live as sustainably as she can. She notes that as someone who has a “public facing” job, she has realised that she is “basically like a billboard” for any brand she wears. After having this realisation, she made a decision: “Years ago, I was like, I’m only going to wear things on stage that are ethically, sustainably made, or small, independent designers, or brands that I really want to celebrate and champion”.
Hamilton started off making her own clothes to wear when performing or shooting music videos, before she decided to start selling her designs. She says that she was adamant that she wanted to make the clothes locally. She wanted to use sustainable processes, and have transparency “so no one’s being exploited in the process, because there’s so much bad shit that goes on in fashion manufacturing”. When speaking about fast fashion brands, she says that they’ve “basically made people believe that they can’t afford to buy sustainably, which is complete bullshit”, noting the ease with which you can buy good quality secondhand clothing. She continues, saying, “also you just don’t need that much stuff, but it’s like the marketing campaigns by these fast fashion brands are telling us that you need to buy stuff constantly… and it’s like, no, that’s fucking bullshit. In the cost of living crisis, we should be buying less, not buying more crap”.
Vivienne Westwood is a “forever icon” for Hamilton, who says “she’s always been a massive inspiration to me as someone who can marry together fashion and the music space”. “There’s so much cool stuff going on with fashion right now, it’s really inspiring”, she says excitedly, before listing off some contemporary brands which she’s been inspired by over the last twelve months. Some that make the list are Miista, Hairy Mary, Dilara Findikoglu, Catholic Guilt and Rhi Dancey. She adds: “it’s really cool to see people who are just doing these really niche things… because what they’re doing is so authentic and so original and so focused on quality, and not just pandering to whatever the next micro trend is”.
To finish off the year, Hamilton released a remix of ‘seven storeys up’ with Dream Journal, which she describes as “a sugary dopamine hit of a song”. She reveals that she has more remixes coming out, and that she plans to work on new music and fashion designs in 2025. However, she’s deliberately kept her calendar “really open” so that she can take time to paint, draw and sew. She says that she’s looking forward to “having time to experiment and to be creative and to just play and not to feel like every single thing I make has to be promo for something or other”, because “having time to be creative is joyful, beautiful and therapeutic”.
Annie Hamilton’s album ‘Stop & Smell The Lightning’ is out now, and you can keep up to date with her through her socials and website for all things music and fashion.
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