Thelma Plum’s Better In Blak, this week’s feature album, is an album of healing, transforming the pain and sadness of a dark few years into a courageous, self-assured debut album.
One day in May last year, Thelma was in a London studio recording a song called ‘Do You Ever Get So Sad That You Can’t Breathe’, when her phone began “blowing up” with dozens of abusive messages.
“Lots of three, four-letter words,” she tells triple j. “Things that you would never say to another human being… When you have people sending you messages to kill yourself, calling you an ‘Abo’, ‘stupid bitch’, ‘slut’ – it’s f**king isolating.”
The next day, despite wanting to “curl up into a ball and quit music forever”, she wrote ‘Better In Blak’ – the triumphant title track, a pop gem that shines like a diamond and is just as indestructible: a moving proclamation of identity from the Gamilaraay songwriter.
“I’m so proud of that song. Not that I’m glad that happened to me but I’m really grateful that I could take something that was so traumatic and turn it into something that is quite positive."
The torrent of racist and misogynistic hate filling Thelma’s inbox last year was the ugly fallout from an incident in 2016, ignited by a private (since deleted) Facebook post about an alleged altercation between Plum and the member of a Sydney band.
It’s a period Thelma does not look upon fondly.
“It was really, really hard,” she reflects. “I’m very resilient now. I’ve got a really good support network around me. Writing and singing about those things that happen and how I felt at the time, it’s very healing for me.”
Seeking closure and self-care during this difficult period ended up sharpening the 24-year-old’s songwriting pen with a plainspoken honesty, resulting in her strongest music yet.
‘Don’t Bring A Good Girl Down’ skewers double standards as Thelma sings ‘pick a side that only suits you at the time’, while ‘Woke Blokes’ is a scathing takedown of the hypocrisy of online ‘activists’. “People who write things on Facebook or change their banner to the latest political trend,” she explains, “but don’t actively implement 'being woke' in their day to day lives.”
Over a bed of sensual finger-snapping and organ, she sings: ‘He’s like, ‘kill the boy down the road who hurt the girl real bad’/Unless he is my friend or plays in my favourite band.’
Better In Blak bites back at her detractors, but it also sees Thelma setting her sights on bigger, more personal targets.
The lilting ‘Homecoming Queen’ reflects on what it felt like growing up as an Aboriginal girl in rural Australia “watching videos on the TV and looking through magazines, but I never saw anyone who looked like me.”
“There was absolutely no representation in mainstream media,” she explains. “That really does something, really skews your idea of beauty. I had to teach myself how to love myself, that I was beautiful and good enough.”
It's a touching moment on the importance of what it means to feel seen, a soulful self-coronation in which Thelma embodies the kind of media role model absent in her own childhood.
She further explores her upbringing in a song about her mother and father’s fractured relationship, titled ‘Thulumaay Gii’, which is Thelma’s middle name and means ‘Thunder and Heart’ in Gamilaraay. “This was a hard song to put on the record and to share – it’s very personal.”
“When bad things happen to you, it takes a lot of work but you can take those bad things and turn them into beautiful things.”
That alchemy is almost the mission statement for the album, which also connected Thelma with a fellow musician who knows a thing or two about transforming tragedy into triumph, Dave Le’aupepe.
The Gang of Youths frontman (“a musical genius and a great human being,” she declares) appears on ‘Love & War’, a song he and Plum co-wrote in response to the Four Corners episode exposing the horrific mistreatment of minors at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin.
“It was the first time I think Australia was forced to take a look at what we let happen,” she says of the sombre tune, featuring murky, down-tuned guitars and the refrain ‘There’s writing on the walls but they can’t read it.’
Le’aupepe isn’t the only musical idol Thelma worked with on Better In Blak. She developed a unique relationship with co-writer and producer Alex Burnett. “I remember going to watch Sparkadia at the Big Day Out when I was a teenager. It was one of the best gigs of my life,” she says of Burnett (who is also one half of Antony & Cleopatra).
“A big thing that he did was give me the space to be able to talk and say what I want. He’s very respectful to me and my ideas.”
You can hear Burnett’s glossy fingerprints in songs like ‘Clumsy Love’ and ‘Not Angry Anymore’, but also how his encouragement has allowed Thelma to flourish in a way we haven’t heard previously.
Across the board, it’s a drastic step-up from 2014’s Monsters EP and the folksy strumming she uploaded to Unearthed back in 2012. But it isn’t a complete departure, it’s an evolution, you can hear traces of her earlier work in the songs that deal, like those releases, with love that’s not gone right.
‘Nick Cave’, written when Plum was 19, chronicles an awkward teen romance in which she pretended to be vegan to impress a romantic interest. The chirpy ‘Ugly’ is dedicated to someone “who maybe wasn’t as good-looking on the inside as he was on the outside”, and the stark acoustic ‘Do You Ever Get So Sad You Can’t Breathe’, came in the wake of a recent heartbreak.
Even as Thelma shares her hardships, she doesn’t come off as a victim. Sure, there’s sadness and vulnerability (‘I’m not perfect, I’m still learning’ she sings on ‘Not Angry Anymore’) but she comes across as charming, courageous, sometimes witty, and gifted with a voice that can express those feelings in a way that really hits you.
It’s those qualities in her music that likely earned the attention of Paul Kelly, who co-wrote the album’s closing track, ‘Made For You’. Teaming with her childhood idol was an “insane, amazing opportunity.”
“Growing up, I listened to his records, I would study his writing, taught myself how to play guitar listening to his songs.”
She recalls arriving at Kelly’s home to collaborate for the first time, “I was an absolute mess before I went into that session. My girlfriend dropped me off and I messaged her straight away, ‘OMFG, I’m so nervous I’m going to vomit’, except it was ‘omit’ instead of ‘vomit’.”
But she’d accidentally sent it to Paul Kelly.
“I knock on the door, he answers. ‘Oh, you just sent me a text, Thelma’. He reads it out loud, ‘are you OK?’ It was so humiliating, but he saw the humour in it.”
“We wrote this beautiful song, probably one of the best I’ve ever written, which definitely has something to do with Paul Kelly, called ‘Made For You’.”
“It’s got a couple of Pauls in it,” she teases. Which brings us to the Beatles co-sign that’s been making headlines around the album, and the story of how Sir Paul McCartney also ended up playing guitar on ‘Made For You’.
One day last year, Thelma was in a New York studio recording with David Kahne, a producer whose credits include The Strokes, The Rubens, and a certain ex-member of The Beatles. She had finished doing vocal takes one afternoon and headed across town when her phone blew up.
Only this time, she’d received the kind of message most musicians only dream of. “I get this text, ‘You’re never going to guess who dropped in today’.”
McCartney had popped in, heard what Kahne was working on, and asked “mind if I lay something down?” The producer replied, “I really don’t think Thelma will mind.”
She didn’t. Well, except "I wish I was in the studio at the time,” she says. “Since then, I’ve got to meet him and thank for being a part of it. It blows my mind when I think about it.”
Better In Blak is out Friday 12 July. After performing at Splendour In The Grass, Thelma Plum embarks on an Australian tour from August. Dates and details here.