Kate Miller-HeidkeThe 2020s have been far from dormant for one Kate Miller-Heidke.
She's been a consistent presence on television as a coach on The Voice, had her presence felt in the theatre world care of her musical Bananaland and remained a consistent part of the Australian touring circuit as both festival performer and theatre-filling headliner.
Perhaps all these side-quests are to blame for what's now been a six-year gap between albums for the Brisbane-based multi-hyphenate. Needless to say, however, she's more than ready to shed her skin and enter a new era on album number six, The Kiss And The Abyss.
“One of the major motivators to make each new record has been that I've started to hate the old one,” she says – in what's the first of several stark, honest statements she makes throughout the interview.
“Whatever new thing I'm making, it's always a reaction against the old one. I cringe a lot when I listen back to my old stuff. A lot of the time, I'm just there going, 'I can't believe I wrote this. Back then, it felt like I was trying to please other people.
“They were still sounds that I liked, but I was sometimes second-guessing an imaginary audience and compromising because of that. ”
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As such, the generally brighter demeanour of 2020's Child in Reverse is eschewed in favour of songs that often delve to deeper, darker realms – something Miller-Heidke has only touched faintly upon with previous albums.
A steely acoustic guitar guides the vast six-minute opener Hidden Things, while creeping piano and synth-bass slink and quiver across the sinister Kate Bush-leaning highlight The Muscle. Miller-Heidke's vocals, soaked in reverb, cast off haunting harmonies and breathy lower register in equal measure.
“The main guiding principle for these songs was gothic folk,” she says of the new material written for The Kiss And The Abyss. “I grew up loving folk music, obviously, and that's how I became a songwriter.
“My early stuff is all pretty folky, but I think what I love about the gothic element is that it allows me to make folk music theatrical, more experimental and expansive – even a little weirder than traditional folk music, too.”
Like the majority of her catalogue, The Kiss And The Abyss was co-written by the husband-and-wife team of Miller-Heidke and guitarist Keir Nuttall. The pair headed to the UK with producer Tom Iansek (of No Mono fame) to record at Bath's Real World Studios – which is owned and operated by none other than Peter Gabriel.
Not only did Miller-Heidke and Nuttall find themselves sonically reaching to starker and more striking musical environments as the songwriting progressed, so too did the lyrics unfurl as ruminations.
“We started digging a lot into the theme of modern life in the internet age, and what the algorithm is doing,” says Miller-Heidke. “Not only to people around us, but what it's doing to the world.
“We found this kind of interesting intersection between that and this medieval folk thing. It seems like a lot of medieval beliefs are creeping back into our collective conscience – these real woo-woo, anti science conspiracy theories and beliefs about the supernatural.
“It's almost as though like the internet has brought these really base instincts back out of people,” she adds. “Because of that, we wanted a record that played as both really modern but also kind of ancient.”
Leading audiences into this new realm, equal parts The Crucible and doomscrolling, was always going to be tricky. You might be shocked, then, to find out that the first single lifted from The Kiss was Holiday – a satirical mini-opera about trying to relax on a titular vacation despite everything going to shit. What can we say? Kate Miller-Heidke contains multitudes.
“It very nearly got left off the record, because it just blatantly doesn't belong,” she says. “I think we just got away with it because of the tracklisting; it comes alongside this other song called Little Ants, which is also vaguely comedic.
“I don't know why we went with that as the first single. Maybe the word on the street was that it was the most instantly accessible. It doesn't sound like anything else on the record, but the other guiding principle for this record was that we wanted to make a bunch of songs that would be really fun to play live.”
If anything, Miller-Heidke views Holiday as reflective of her oeuvre. Yes, this is the woman responsible for The Devil Wears A Suit, a haunting trad-folk reflection on child abuse within the Catholic church. But she's also the woman responsible for one of the smuttiest festive songs ever recorded, I'm Growing A Beard Downstairs For Christmas.
To appreciate Kate Miller-Heidke, you need one just as much as the other. “I like playing up the comedic as much as the dramatic,” she reasons. “For me, you need that light and shade. Yes, you need the darkness and the drama, but you also need those lighter moments.
“Besides, life is funny. I think any art without a sense of humour doesn't reflect real life at all.”
The idea of these crying and laughing drama faces being conveyed under a single name – her name, no less – gives pause for thought when it comes to how we're perceived. You're under the impression Kate Miller-Heidke has to be Kate Miller-Heidke all the time – not in a literal sense, but in a polite and media-trained and charming sense.
She has to be the role model, the one signing posters for kids and smiling big for photos. Miller-Heidke argues, however, that it's the same for any higher profile singer-songwriter when the cameras are turned off, the microphones are packed away and the stage lights come down.
“I think everybody performs and inhabits different personas,” she says. “For me, it's an escape; I can escape into the artist/performer version of myself, and in a lot of ways I think it's the best version of myself. In real life I'm much less confident, and I can be socially awkward, but I feel ten feet tall when I'm on stage.
“In that moment, I'm connected to something much bigger than myself. I think I've always felt that, and that's why it becomes so addictive – especially if you're trying to run away from yourself on some level.”
This is the duality that presents itself within Kate Miller-Heidke's musical universe. You can't have the rainbow without the rain, you can't have the triumph without the tragedy and you can't have the kiss without the abyss.
For someone who feels like there is a multiverse of Miller-Heidkes at play, Kate has never sounded more assured of herself when discussing this album.
“This record doesn't compromise,” she says. “It's unashamedly weirder, and darker, and has a better sense of humour. Creatively, it's the most interesting record I've ever made. It has a lot of beauty and surprise.
“As a music listener I love to be surprised, and I think this record has lots of them. It has lots of poetry, lots of drama, and lots of peculiar modern feelings that you don't really hear about all that often.”
Before she rolls out a full-scale band tour in support of the album, probably early next year, Miller-Heidke and Nuttall will take to the road next month in a classic duo format for a run of stripped-back and intimate performances.
They have a secret weapon, too: acclaimed Melbourne composer and musical improviser Xani Kolac.
“She's not only opening for us, but joining us for a bunch of songs as well,” says Miller-Heidke. “She's a violinist, and she does a lot of cool stuff with loops and effects. I love playing acoustically, because it gives us so much freedom.
“We have to reinvent the songs, as a lot of them are very reliant on drums and bass. It's almost like we're doing cover versions of my own songs. It's occasionally stressful, but it can definitely be a fun process.”
With more material to draw from than ever before, you can expect all aspects of Miller-Heidke's personas to shine through during these launch shows. Whether they're fresh cuts from the new album or songs that have been played endlessly, they're unified by this: They are being performed from the heart, and for a reason.
“These songs are alive,” says Miller-Heidke resolutely. “They change over time, and their meanings shift. If I'm singing a song like Space They Cannot Touch, which I wrote 20 years ago, I'm not interested in going back and trying to inhabit me from back then. I'd find that really boring.
“If I'm performing a song now, it still rings true to me on some level now.”
Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Kiss And The Abyss is released on August 14th, with pre-orders available now.
