Ngaiire

“Israel is looking pretty good at the moment,” she says with a smile via Skype, half a world away. “I’ll be away for a week and a half, and then we will go straight into the album tour.”

Blastoma will be in stores through her own label Maximillion Brown on Friday June 10, and despite its winter release date, Ngaiire says the record was made over a period of two years and across time zones between New York and London. Along with her collaborators – electronic music master Paul Mac and producer Jack Grace – Ngaiire spent hours sending tracks back and forth to create the soulful and insightful tone of the album.

As the follow-up to 2013’s Lamentations, this new release is a brave and intensely personal effort from the one-time Australian Idol contestant. Blastomais a form of cancer commonly found in children, and as a survivor of childhood cancer herself, Ngaiire chose this title to pay homage to those around her. “Blastoma is a memorial to what I went through during cancer treatment, but it’s also to pay tribute to the people who have helped me over the years,” she says. “And if I could get through a moment in my life that was quite challenging, I hope it’s an inspiration to anyone going through a difficult time.”

Ngaiire has always been incredibly open about her struggles in life and love, but never more so than on the nine tracks that make up Blastoma. Her smooth and soulful vocals draw you in from the opening track ‘Anchor’, and they continue to hold you captive during the first half of the album, thanks to a special edit of her hit ‘Once’.

The second half of the record, however, is quite different. It takes on a more personal tone and deals with spirituality, heartbreak, love and loss. “They’re all so macabre!” Ngaiire laughs, before becoming more serious. “I wrote ‘I Can’t Hear God Anymore’ about someone I had a deep spiritual connection with, but we don’t talk anymore. It’s quite rare to find musicians that you connect with on a spiritual level – I’ve only ever had that with him. It’s a song about lamenting over that relationship.”

The final track on Blastoma was written with the help of her friend and producer, Grace. “Jack and I wrote it together immediately after we got back from Glastonbury, and both our partners had broken up with us on the same day, as soon as we got back,” Ngaiire says. “We were meant to be in the studio writing an uplifting album but that was the first song that came out of us.

“So we kind of left it a bit because it wasn’t feeling very therapeutic or even right to write about our relationships. Then Jack got a call from a friend of his saying that another schoolmate of his had just tested HIV positive. That prompted us to finish the song, and it became more about him not being able to put into words how he felt about that situation, rather than our relationships. So it’s kind of interesting how songs seem to eventuate so differently sometimes.”