EMILY WURRAMARA'S PERFORMANCE DATE TBD

On the road from Wurramara’s breakout album at age 22 to her second release six years later, she was hit with postpartum depression after her first daughter’s birth along with other mental health issues.

Then a fire tore through her home; she and her child escaped uninjured, but they lost all their possessions.

As she worked through the grief, her mother tattooed a single word in their people’s Anindilyakwa: nara, or “nothing.” It was a clarifying moment: “It was when I had nothing, I realized I had everything,” she’d say.

On that new album – titled Nara – Wurramara slices through genre boxes with a whirl of folk, blues, modern soul and country. Her confessional songwriting touches on her Indigenous heritage and Wurramara’s own life awakenings, held aloft on a voice that’s plenty soulful with liberal dashes of sweetness and cheeky charm. In other words, it’s not nothing.

– Jason Markusoff