Grace Cummings“I’m at the hairdresser,” Grace Cummings beams, wearing a black salon cape and towel draped across her shoulders. She had requested an off-cam Zoom interview, but has gone rogue: “I've got my camera on!”
Introducing her hair stylist of choice – who waves into the camera, before combing her client’s long, wet locks – Cummings enthuses, “I’m getting a glow-up. I realised this is a really big week and it's a thing that I forget to put a focus on, sometimes.” Then she turns her camera off.
Cummings admits she’s feeling “terrified and excited” ahead of her handful of Bloodhorse! album launch shows around the country. “I obviously made this album knowing that it couldn’t be recreated that way live on stage, and it's not gonna stop me making an album like that; I think they’re two very different things.
“There’s a secondary creation process, which is [translating the songs] into live versions. But I’ve just focused on feeling and emotion, and I’m really lucky that my band here – Louis [King], Tommy [Brooks], Tex [Keane] and Miles [Brown] – are absolutely incredible. I feel like we’ve got that down.”
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Bloodhorse! – the latest and fourth album by Cummings – is intense, unflinching and brilliantly bonkers. Synths, acoustic and electric guitars, piano, strings, woodwind, galloping drums, breathy vocal percussion, two minutes of drone, 45 seconds of AI-generated bro-country – Cummings utilises a limitless, grandiose sonic palette on this one, spewing unfiltered self-expression throughout.
Her vocal performances also run the gamut, from delicate and pretty to roaring and feral – sometimes within a single song. These feelings and emotions clearly needed expelling.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a trapped animal,” Cummings reveals in the Bloodhorse! presser. “And… when I go to sleep, sometimes it’s like I’m in the gate, twitching. And as soon as I open my eyes, I’m fucking running.”
Bloodhorses are thoroughbreds bred specifically for racing that are expected to win. They are often high-strung by nature, and Cummings feels an affinity for them.
The title track’s lyrics were partly inspired by Botox remorse. When Cummings visited a beauty clinic to treat herself to a birthday facial, the clinician handed her a mirror and asked her to identify what she didn’t like about herself.
Cummings pointed to her furrowed brow. He talked her into getting some Botox.
“That's a small part of a larger story,” Cummings clarifies. “I think that it's just a part of a bigger feeling, or a bigger concept, of changing yourself to please others. And expecting that that might make a positive shift in you, where it is the opposite, really.
“And I think that I brought up that particular Botox thing not because I'm against it at all, but because of what [the clinician] said to me: ‘Nobody needs to frown.’ The profundity in that sentence really stuck with me and I realised that I do need to frown, because having it stuck takes away my expression, you know? And that's literally with that story, but also metaphorically as well.”
While exchanging stories about being told by men to smile more, we discover – incredibly – that we’ve both been told to ‘cheer up’ by strangers on days we attended funerals.
“I was going to a funeral once and I stepped out of the car, all dressed in black, and this man came up to me and said, ‘You know, it wouldn't hurt you to smile and to wear some colour. What's going on?’ And I said, ‘Oh, thank you. I'm just on my way to a funeral, but have a great day.’ And his face went white and he said, ‘I'm so sorry.’ And I said, ‘All good, man. Have a good one.’
“And, you know, I don't really like to revel in schadenfreude, but I felt a little bit of it then [laughs]. I walked away with a smile into that funeral, ‘cause of getting that guy. ‘Cause I get it all the time! My new favourite thing is to tell men to smile: ‘Come on, honey, give me a smile.’
“And I think people kind of misunderstand my vulnerability sometimes – or processing of difficult or melancholic things within music – and think that I am a person that does not experience joy. And I think that that couldn't be further from the truth. I don't think I'd be able to create the dark stuff without knowing what it's like to be really joyful as well.”
The album’s third single, FAKE, explores the toxic weight of being praised as a “good girl” (aka Good Girl Syndrome), which Cummings has described as an internalised form of abuse.
“I think those words [‘good girl’], for some people more than others, are pretty harmful – certainly for a really, really disappointing amount of people, as well,” Cummings elaborates. “It takes a long time to move on from the way that you are treated as a girl, and what’s expected of you and what’s handed to you in terms of identity.
“You’re kind of handed a good girl identity that you’ve gotta live up to, and I think it’s bullshit and it fucks us up as we get older.”
We’re obsessed with the Bloodhorse! cover photo – a close-up of a doll’s head – and need to know more. “I looked far and wide for that doll,” Cummings shares. “It's a really old handmade German doll from, like, the ‘20s, with real hair and eyes that open and close.
“I found a photo of a doll similar to that doll, and I was just absolutely obsessed with the expression on her face. And I ended up finding a woman who had a similar one from her great aunt. And I bought it, to recreate the dissociated look of that doll.”
The record’s insert features a recreation of a photo Cummings took of the moonlit sky from her balcony, painted by her mother, Lisa.
“My mum’s awesome,” Cummings gushes, “and it was important to me to include her in there. She is a real pillar of strength for me, as are all the women in my family.”
Cummings embraced spontaneity while creating Bloodhorse!, which was recorded over two weeks at Jonathan Wilson's Fivestar Studios in Topanga Canyon, California. Track three, the piano-driven Paradise, was written about ten minutes before hitting record.
“I didn't know it would be like that,” Cummings reflects, of Bloodhorse!’s creative process. “And a lot of the lyrics were just written at the time, which I love. Because I guess going back to presentness and being real and raw – it feels that way when something comes to you in the moment.”
When asked how she first connected with Wilson – who also produced her previous masterpiece, 2024’s Ramona – Cummings recalls, “I was feeling very tired in the tour van one day and I was listening to a record that he had produced.
“And I got a bit of confidence out of nowhere – like, I wouldn't ever usually do this, but I had this kind of gut confidence and I just cold-messaged him. And half an hour later, I got a message back saying, ‘I listened to Storm Queen [Cummings’ 2022 album], I love it. And I wanna do it [produce Ramona].’ And I couldn't believe it! I thought it was someone tricking me, but it wasn't. It was him!
“I fuckin’ love that guy. He's an absolute freak. We became really close recording Ramona and we have that same kind of childlike, playful, chaotic quality. I was really lucky that he was the most beautiful fit, and is so understanding and ‘anything goes’. He's a massive, massive champion of me and I'm so grateful for him. He is a real supporter of just leaning into who you are, and a lot of that's a bit strange. And we both enjoy the strange more than the non-strange,” she trails off laughing.
In Bloodhorse!’s accompanying track-by-track, Cummings reveals Wilson handed her “a massive scythe” to brandish while recording the chorus for WITCH! WITCH! WITCH! (which contains the lyrics, “I’ve sold my soul to the reaper man”).
“It's a classic Jonathan Wilson thing to do,” Cummings observes of being presented with said prop. “Not to blow smoke up my arse or anything – that’s not what I mean – but I was in the room doing my vocals for that song, and he did something which he never really does: he came in on the cans and was like, ‘Oh, Grace, this isn't really working out. You've gotta come into the control room.’
“And I was like, ‘What?’ Usually he’d just be like, ‘Oh, do another pass,’ or ‘Try again,’ or, ‘Let's go for a second time,’ or whatever. And I was like, ‘Oh, fuck! I must’ve really done something wrong.
“I walked into the control room and he's laughing. And on the desk – which is this massive desk – he's got an actual scythe. Everyone started laughing and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ And then he was like, ‘All right, there you go. Go do it again.’ So for that song, I am actually holding a reaper-man scythe in my hands.” She cracks up laughing, before pondering, “I don't know why he's got one; best not to know, haha.”
While recording Ramona, Wilson described a guitar rhythm as “John, John, Lennon, Lennon”, which immediately resonated with Cummings.
“[The expression] could be a Jonathan Wilson thing; he could’ve coined that, I’m not sure,” she confesses. “As soon as he said that, I was just like, ‘That is the best fucking thing I’ve ever heard and it’s gotta be in something!’
“We were talking about playing guitar in – I can’t remember what song it was, maybe Common Man, or something? – and he was like, ‘Try going in there and do it like John, John, Lennon, Lennon – down, down, down-up, down-up – and I was like, ‘Whaaaat? That’s fucking awesome!’
“He was pretty happy when I came back and was like, ‘Check this out!’”
Cummings, who’s been “obsessed” with John Lennon since “babyhood”, named track eight on her latest album after the Beatle.
“I’m not the first person to be obsessed [with Lennon],” she points out, “but mine was a full, full, full obsession. I collected every bit of paraphernalia, I painted lyrics on my bedroom wall. And then finding out that he was shot by a fan…
“[Lennon] opened up a lot of things for me, and a lot of ways of expression, as well. He’s certainly not the creator of this kind of stuff, but albums like Plastic Ono Band and that kind of like scream therapy almost, which he incorporates into that.
“Just his total rawness, I’m so grateful for. [Lennon] and The Beatles are the sound of everything that is good in the world, to me.”
In an interview with Kelly McCartney, the late, great Sinéad O'Connor said, “The point of a song, really, is to stop you losing your mind.”
“I do think that to be very true,” Cummings concurs, “and I think the context of her saying that was, you know, there are plenty of ways to make a record for the wrong reasons… What it means to need to sing, or to need to make music, was what she was talking about there, and what I'm talking about as well.”
O'Connor was prone to unleashing unbridled rage through song (see: Troy and Drink Before The War, especially) – much like Cummings, who seems thrilled by this comparison: “Oh, that's really great! The important thing for me, I suppose, is to lead with feeling and emotion.
“And I think that, leaning into that, not a lot of that is particularly palatable or pretty; it involves a lot of rawness and sometimes ugliness, at a deeper level.”
Grace Cummings’ Bloodhorse! 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
