Amy Shark has written songs with some of the biggest names in the biz — Ed Sheeran, Jack Antonoff, and each of the Blink-182 guys, to name just a few — but for her fourth studio album, she decided she’d fly totally solo.
The singer and Australian Idol judge announced this morning that she’ll be releasing a new album, titled Soft Pop, in July — and also released its lead single, “The Biggest Dick”, that she’s been teasing on social media in the past few weeks.
“This album feels a lot bigger than the rest, just because I did it so differently,” Shark tells marie claire. Instead of writing multiple songs in multiple studios as she did for her previous albums, this time Shark holed up in her apartment and wrote alone.
“It was torture at the start,” she says, laughing, but eventually she found her (literal) groove. “Gradually, the songs came together.” For previous albums, Shark could have 50 songs to choose from, but with Soft Pop, it was just 15 — an intentionally curated edit. “I took 11 to [the recording studio]. I had these disciplined guidelines of no beats, no old sounds — I did everything differently; even the tuning of my guitar and my mic were different.
“It was important to have a different sound.”
The album signals a new era for Shark, who burst onto the Australian music scene in 2016 with her hit single “Adore” and subsequent album, Love Monster. In the decade since, she’s become a mainstay in the country’s music scene, releasing her EP Night Thinker in 2017 and her two LPs, Cry Forever in 2021, and Sunday Sadness in 2024.
This April, Shark will also make her feature film debut in Beast, starring Russell Crowe and Dancing With The Stars‘ former host Daniel MacPherson as a retired MMA fighter who returns to the cage to avenge his brother (no spoilers).
Soft Pop is out on July 31.
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