For Holly Hebe, heartbreak has a colour; so does the process of coming of age; so does the key of B-flat.
The Naarm-based singer-songwriter experiences life in a kaleidoscope of hues, and she has given us a vivid taste of this colour-forward way of living with her third EP Mood Ring.
The project was released just over a week ago, but has already cemented its status as a climate-controlled triumph: Hebe’s melodies are perfectly crafted for radio play, and her talent for sonic accessibility and universal emotion has propelled her right to the very crest of the ARIA charts.
Over a late afternoon Zoom call, Hebe’s make-up is immaculate: her eyelids silvery, her skin dewy. Bone-bleached strands of her hair are tucked away with custom clips that are linked together with charms, making it look like she’s wearing a delicate little headdress.
All of this is to say that, from song colours to the tips of her temples, she has a masterful eye for the curation of aesthetics.
Hands crossed over her chest, Hebe says of Mood Ring’s release, “I’ve been holding onto these songs for so long, and I’ve put so much work into the EP, and all of a sudden it’s out. So it’s a really weird feeling. But it’s also so rewarding and fulfilling.”
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She describes her launch show in Melbourne. “I was playing this song Nineteen, and it had only been out for a few days, but everyone was singing the lyrics back to me,” she gushes.
“That feeling is insane. I get emotional when I hear that happening. Because it’s like, that’s a song that I wrote alone at the piano when I was in the pit of my despair, and now people are relating to it and singing along to it.”
Mood Ring chronicles two experiences that almost everyone can relate to: having your heart split in two, and growing up. Just listen to the lyrics of Nineteen: “If you told me at 19/We’d come crashing down at 23/I’d take you to dinner/And lick my plate clean.”
She admits that Mood Ring is probably her most acutely personal release yet. Previously, she explains, her writing involved lots of digging up the past, recycling emotions, trying to put fresh spins on old stories.
“But a lot of this EP was written from the actual epicentre of my feelings,” she explains. “And I have really enjoyed writing like that – just hot off the press, feeling something and instantly using it as song fuel.”
Thus Mood Ring possesses some of her most “verbatim” lyricism. “And that was definitely confronting for me at the start. Like, how is the person that these songs are about going to feel?”
But such vulnerability has led to emotional catharsis. “I feel so much more connected to these songs because they are so direct. It has helped me process those feelings so much.”
Music can also make it easier to vocalise those very feelings. “The music feels like a bit of a mask and makes it easier for me to express certain things.” Songwriting through the romantic fallout has definitely helped her find meaning and closure.
“Music was always such a through-line in that relationship as well,” she explains. “So it just feels like the most ideal outlet. Taking it out of my system and putting it into a song feels almost like an exorcism.”
The title Mood Ring perfectly encapsulates the colourful emotional spectrum of heartbreak, as well as acting as a nod to the cheap drugstore mood rings we all donned in youth.
“I always liken this experience to deciding on a tattoo,” Hebe says of settling on a project title. “I’ll think of different ideas for a while and then all of sudden something will just click and feel right.”
With the title of her third EP, she wanted something that perfectly distilled the desolate attempt to outsource validation and affirmation from something outside of yourself. “And then I thought, mood ring – something that you look at desperately to tell you how you’re feeling.”
The title is also in line with her very distinct visual outlook on music. “The piano is my main instrument and I’ve been playing it for so long. When I’m playing it I’m always sort of seeing scenes and shapes and things in my head.”
While writing and producing the EP, she spent her spare time in corners of the studio drawing and painting.
“It became a way for me to get these ideas out of my head and onto something that I could see, and that really helped shape the visual world of the EP,” she explains. “I’m always thinking about colour in relation to music, especially in relation to different keys that I’m playing.”
She has, in fact, assigned every track on Mood Ring its own colour. Babypickyourphoneup is purple, for example. The EP in general – extending to colour palette included on its cover – boasts “muted greens and purple,” she explains. “It’s colourful but also a bit subdued, which I think is the whole vibe of the EP.”
Hebe has just experienced heartbreak and self-discovery, has just performed an exorcism upon these feelings to give us this EP – but she is still thinking ahead to the next release.
“Right now I’m living the experiences that I’m probably going to write the next big project about,” she says. “I’m sort of in this experimental phase, so I’m really excited to build off that and see where it takes me.”
Knowing that she can write about her experiences later has helped her survive the more complex aspects of adulthood. “Like, at least I might get a song out of it,” she laughs.
“It feels like some sort of emotional tax deduction: I’m going through this now, but the pay-off will be good later.”
She adds, “But it can also be distracting at the same time - like, I’m maybe not focused on what’s happening to me and instead just looking for imagery that I can turn into lyrics later.”
Tenderly 24, she is definitely at an age where every experience feels major, every break-up feels cataclysmic. Being a twentysomething is not for the faint of heart – change abounds, and everything feels unprecedented.
“I think I’ve had some extremely rite-of-passage, transformative early-20s experiences over the past six months or so,” she says. “It’s made me think about what it is to be an adult so much more.
“Because a lot of the time, I’m like, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing!’ And then I’ll go through something really hard and realise, ‘Hey, I do actually have the skills to survive this.’”
The width between age 20 and age 24 feels mammoth; at this stage of being, so much is packed into the span of a few months that life feels dizzying. “It’s confronting to look back on my younger self,” she admits. “I don’t know if I feel like an adult yet but there are days where I can really see some growth happening, which is nice.”
Hebe’s early 20s, she explains, “definitely chewed me up and spat me out.”
But, ultimately, that is fine by her: “You just have to use those ingredients to build something.”
Holly Hebe’s Mood Ring is out now.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
