The Year of the Fire Horse has barely begun when marie claire meets with Amy Shark, but the singer has already hit the ground running. Or, shall we say, galloping.
As the Lunar Year of the Wood Snake wound up on February 16 – ending a period of reflection, shedding and transformation (you might have felt it) – Shark was getting ready to say goodbye to the version of herself that had been in the public domain for a decade.
When the world woke up on the morning of February 17, a new year had begun. While a Fire Horse sounds like a harbinger for the apocalypse, it’s actually a rare zodiac sign that kicks off a period of energy, creativity, intensity and independence. Yee-haw! Giddy-up! Etcetera, etcetera. Energy, creativity, intensity and independence is exactly how you could describe Shark’s mode of operation in 2026.
There’s a new album, two new films, and an appearance on the soundtrack of Lena Dunham’s upcoming Netflix romcom film, Good Sex, for which Dunham personally requested Shark. “I’m also turning 40!” she adds to the end of the list she’s been counting on one hand. “We’re galloping, we’re swimming – it’s the Year of the Fire Shark!”
For now, Shark is saddled and pawing at the starting gates, ready to bolt, but the starting pistol hasn’t fired just yet. In reality, she’s in a room on Sydney’s Oxford Street, sitting cross-legged in an armchair, wearing a cream tee, cream jeans and Prada’s Monolith leather boots with the little pouch on the side.
Her signature half-up top-knot is undone, so her dark wavy hair falls over her shoulders beneath a baseball cap. The morning sun is reflecting off the windows scattered across the skyline and Sydney Harbour is glittering in the distance.
It’s a beautiful day, the type of weather that lifts spirits after a stretch of ugly grey skies and suffocating humidity. Suffice to say, vibes are high, even more so because it’s the day before Shark is going to announce her fourth album – her first in two years – Soft Pop. Her excitement is palpable. That’s because this album is unlike anything she’s done before. Literally everything is different, right down to the tuning of her guitar. Where Shark would normally work with a team of co-writers (Ed Sheeran and Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker among them) while bouncing between studios and hotels in the US, she decided she would fly solo when it came to writing Soft Pop.
“I wrote alone in my apartment [on the Gold Coast], and it was torture at the start,” she says with a laugh, resting one ankle on top of her other knee and leaning back: confident, focused, in control. “I’d have really terrible days when I was just over it, but I was so disciplined. I was determined to get on that plane [to Wales] with strong songs to record.” In her other life – pre-2026 Amy Shark – she would have written 50 songs, which she would have struggled to cut down to a 12-song album.
This time, she wrote far fewer. She wasn’t diving into old notebooks for lyrics discarded from previous albums; she was starting entirely from scratch. And then, suddenly, she wasn’t. “For some reason I stopped writing. I was in a bit of a funk,” Shark says.
But what she had was gold: 15 options, which she then edited down to 11 for the album. At Hymn Studios, in the seaside town of Barry, she worked with just one producer: Dann Hume, her long-time collaborator, who has also worked with Matt Corby and Troye Sivan.
“I just stayed in one place for a month and really focused on the album,” she recalls. “I had really disciplined guidelines: no beats, no old sounds.” Soft Pop proves that sometimes there’s freedom to be found in restraint. Or, to flog the metaphor, in having your blinders on. “Those guidelines were my superpower with this album,” Shark says.
Like a kid frozen in the toy aisle of Kmart, “when there’s every sound in the world available to you in a studio, it’s really hard”. Instead, she focused on one thing at a time. “Everything just worked,” she adds, with an undertone of amazement. “Even the vocal takes that I was going for, sometimes it was like, ‘Is that the best note I could have hit? No,’ but it was about the vibe. I don’t care if it’s not sung correctly or if someone can’t figure out what that line is – I don’t give a shit.
The mood was what was really important to me. “These songs are good,” she continues. “I want people to be excited again. I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh this is just another Amy Shark record.’ It’s so different.”
The desire to reinvent is one that every creative experiences. It’s an instinct and a necessity. “It’s really important to have a different sound to stand out again,” she adds. You only have to bring to mind one of Shark’s heroes – Taylor Swift – to understand the power of reinvention. Something different is what Shark has been craving. Australia has known her for a decade now, since the release of her first single, “Adore”, in 2016.
“Ten years feels like ages, but then there have been so many Australian artists who’ve been around for much longer – your Guy Sebastians, your Delta Goodrems – so it also feels like a minute,” she says. “But I feel like I’ve covered a lot of ground. I’ve pumped out a lot of albums. I feel like I’ve had about six different lives just from like 16 on, through relationships, friendships, jobs, family dramas. It’s so crazy to think back on.”
Shark may have had multiple lives, but her indie-pop-slash-punk-pop-slash-diary-girl sound has remained relatively consistent from the moment Love Monster – her debut album that features “Adore” alongside other fan favourites “I Said Hi” and “Mess Her Up” – hit the charts in 2018.
She followed it up in 2021 with Cry Forever, and then Sunday Sadness in 2024. But in 2026, Shark’s music is different, and you get the sense that she is different, too. There’s the lack of her signature hairstyle, for one. It wasn’t there when she spoke at marie claire’s International Women’s Day lunch; it wasn’t there during our shoot and it wasn’t there during our interview. It’s also not there in the video clip for her lead single, “The Biggest Dick”, which sees her biking around town in a fluffy baby-blue bikini. It’s like the pop-punk girl has given way to the Gold Coast chick who’s always lived inside her but never fully taken over. This is also a side of Shark we haven’t seen – all muscle and abs in a bikini. To put it simply: she’s shredded. Like, mixed-martial-arts-fighter shredded? Funny you should ask.
In April, Shark will make her feature film debut in the MMA fight movie Beast alongside Russell Crowe and Daniel MacPherson. The latter plays Patton James, a former fight champion on his redemption tour.
Crowe plays Sammy, his former coach, and Shark plays Rose, Sammy’s daughter and Patton’s new coach. A thing to know about Shark and acting is that she’s good. Despite being on a first-name basis with “Russell” and having him hand the script to her personally, she worked hard to earn the role of Rose. She trained, she auditioned, she was the casting team’s top choice. “I would always say to Russell, ‘When are you gonna get me in a movie?’ and I don’t think he believed me at the start,” she says. In fact, acting was Shark’s first love. “I always wanted to be an actress. I love scary movies. I always wanted to be Neve Campbell,” she adds with a self-deprecating laugh.
“And then Russell called me on my bluff and gave me a script. He said, ‘I think this would be great for you, but I can’t promise anything.’” Knowing the role wasn’t guaranteed lit a fire (sorry) under Shark. “I’ve never been given a leg up in my life [so] it would feel really wrong and uncomfortable to have been handed the part,” she says. “I wanted to know I could do it for myself.” She wasn’t coming into the audition well-rested and clear-of-mind, either.
It was the morning after the 2024 ARIA Awards, when Shark sang “The Special Two” with Missy Higgins for the latter’s introduction into the Hall of Fame. “I was so stressed that night,” she says, laughing at the absurdity of getting through such a massive 24 hours. “I had so much on my mind: singing and doing interviews and trying to remember this dialogue for tomorrow. It was just so funny.”
Once she got the call saying she would be playing Rose, Shark was required to be on set and ready to go within the month. “I had just a few weeks to get myself into shape and look the part,” she explains. “I had a trainer named Igor [Breakenback], who was also showing me how he trains his fighters, because Rose has to train Patton for reasons you’ll find out. I had to take real hits and get in there and swear at him and push him and look like I’m not terrified.”
Among the singing and punching, Shark also found time to return to Australian Idol as a judge alongside Marcia Hines and Kyle Sandilands. (By the time you’re reading this, the winner will have been announced, but at the time of writing, the series is only a few weeks in.) It’s her third season of judging singing hopefuls on the reality show, and Shark has carved out a reputation for being supportive while also having a strong radar for inauthenticity. She knows from her time playing gigs on sticky pub floors that being authentic is what cuts through the noise – both of the crowd and the industry.
Shark will also get to live out her horror movie star dreams towards the end of the year in Zombie Plane. She can’t say much at the moment other than it also stars Sophie Monk, Vanilla Ice, Natalie Bassingthwaighte and the late Chuck Norris. It’s a comedy-action flick about the government’s use of celebrities to prevent a zombie outbreak.
“It’s terribly amazing,” she says, laughing. So, with a new sound, an MMA fight movie, mentoring and judging a new generation of Australian pop stars, a 40th birthday in May and then fighting zombies (presumably on a plane), what’s next? “Next year I’m just going to go and, like, live in Hawaii and chill,” she says, laughing again.
Given 2027 is the Year of the Goat, which suggests gentleness, compassion and romance, an off-grid escape to Hawaii may be on the cards. But if there’s one thing we know about sharks, it’s that they never stop moving.
Listen to Soft Pop from July 31. Beast is in cinemas now and streaming on STAN from June 4, 2026.
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