Ali Barter

Over the course of two EPs – 2012’s Trip and 2014’s Community – coupled with a steady stream of national tours and pub residencies, Barter and band have won over audiences through sheer craft and perseverance. With her latest six-track release, AB-EP, she is once again hitting the road, showcasing her latest singles and demonstrating exactly why this triple j Unearthedwinner is a name to watch.

“I don’t know if I consciously think of keeping each gig unique,” Barter begins. She is speaking to us between shows; last night she supported Meg Mac, and in a few hours is set to do the whole thing over again. “I just want to go out and have fun. I think in that way it will be different every time.

“If you go out wanting each gig to be a certain way, you’re gonna be disappointed, because it never works out the way you think it will. I think the main thing is I have a really awesome band, and we’ve learnt to say to each other before we go out, ‘Let’s rock hard, have fun, and if someone fucks up, well, then someone fucks up,’ and we get through it smiling. Or I’ll just get really angry, and none of them gets paid.”

She laughs, and the image of the tyrant bandleader is instantly dispelled. Barter comes across as a genuine, down-to-earth singer, yet a great deal of her conversation is riddled with second-guessing herself. There is an unexpected blend of confidence and uncertainty as she reflects on the development of her music over the last few years, and while her music is hardly the stuff of wallowing despair, there are certainly shades of sadness and frustration that sit hidden in the shallows. Her latest single from the EP, ‘Blood’, is damned compelling, while the first single, ‘Hypercolour’, is deceptively layered.

“With ‘Hypercolour’, it was sort of the song that everyone we played it to – industry people, my manager, live crowds – it seemed the most different to what I’d done in the past. I think we always knew that ‘Hypercolour’ and ‘Blood’ would be the two singles. You think about a single, you want something that’s going to make an impact. Sometimes you just have a feeling about a song, and it’s something you can’t really explain. Other times you’ll sit with a song for so long, you just want them to be heard and you stop hearing them clearly.”

She pauses. “Sometimes when people say, ‘What is that song about?’ I struggle to communicate it, and when somebody else explains it I’ll be like, ‘That’s it!’ With ‘Hypercolour’, no-one has ever said anything that I’m outright offended by. But I think that’s really the beauty of music. Someone can play a song, and they’ll hear something that’s relevant to them.

“Sometimes, when I’m asked, I’ll say it’s about needing to shake the monkey from your back, finding some way to free yourself, but then sometimes I think about when the song was written. It came about in a really, really dark time. I didn’t feel any hypercolour in my life, any happiness. I was in a dark place, so the song came to be me projecting myself away from that. Projecting myself somewhere more beautiful, somewhere happier than where I was. So even for me, the song has different meanings.”

Between the two singles there is a significant shift in intent, if not tone, and across the EP this broad palette is clearer still. While Barter’s strengths are growing with each release, she is still a young talent – there is a restlessness in her that is reflected in the music; a refusal to find comfort in the confines of one set sound. It is a facet of her songwriting that Barter freely acknowledges, and has become something celebrated by fans and critics alike.

“I think there’s beauty in different tastes, and that’s why I’m so glad I’ve done three EPs now. I’ve wanted to try different things, and I haven’t really wanted to lock down into any particular sound. I read reviews, and I do agree that I’m going from one extreme to another in some respects. But I think, at their core, all the songs are simple. They have great guitar, have great drums, they’re bound together in something we can recreate live. They’re all my songs – they’re real parts of me.

“I really like the way these six stitch together. Sometimes when songs are written at a certain time, they’re fused together by something magical. Those six songs just go together – nothing else needed to be added.”

Talk of where Barter sees herself today leads, of course, to where it all began. Many musicians claim not to recall the details of their first songwriting efforts, but in this instance the memory remains clear.

“I wrote this song called ‘Friend Or Foe’,” Barter recalls. “I wrote it because I kissed a boy my best friend at the time liked. She got really angry with me, and I felt terrible. So I wrote this song, and it was so bad, but I went to her house and played it to her. It went, ‘Why, why, why, I don’t know / Why I want to be a friend and a foe’. Really shit lyrics, but it came from the heart.”

She laughs. “That’s what counts, right?”