Grace Cummings has never sounded particularly interested in making herself easy to define. Across three albums, the Melbourne singer-songwriter has built a body of work around a voice that can feel enormous one moment and impossibly intimate the next, earning international acclaim with 2024’s Ramona and establishing herself as one of Australia’s most outstanding performers.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ also named her as one of our 25 “Future of Music” ones to watch for 2025.
On her new album, Bloodhorse!, released August 14th via Virgin Music Australia, Cummings pushes even further inward. Recorded once again in Topanga Canyon with Grammy-nominated producer Jonathan Wilson, the record moves through pain, fear, imagination and self-acceptance, ultimately finding its way towards something brighter.
Cummings herself compares its emotional landscape to the weather: darkness rolls in, danger looms, and then suddenly “colour returns, and imagination makes happiness and wonder possible.”
That tension is particularly striking on recent single “I’m Not Crazy”, a sparse and unsettling song about violence and the ways far can teach someone to make themselves smaller.
Cummings deliberately sings it differently, leaning into innocence and vulnerability as both character and hiding place. It sits comfortably within an album that, for all its heavier themes, is also about stripping away judgement and returning to something more instinctive. As Cummings explains, making Bloodhorse! meant reconnecting with the person she was before outside expectations taught her who she was supposed to be.
That instinct extends to the way she works. Despite releasing albums at a relatively prolific pace, Cummings says creating music remains the part that comes naturally; it’s everything surrounding it that has become more complicated as her career has grown. The goal, she says, is simply to make something real, before overthinking has the chance to get in the way.
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Speaking to Rolling Stone AU/NZ, Cummings discusses Bloodhorse!, the strange unreality of critical acclaim, the realities facing Australian musicians, her relationship with live performance, and why leaning into who she is has made this album the easiest one yet to create.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ: It sounds like you’re contending with weighty themes on this album. Is there an overarching narrative to the record?
Grace Cummings: I think that life contends with weighty themes… They’re difficult but I’m also grateful for them. I see life a little bit like the weather and this album could probably be seen that way as well… As Gene Wilder once sang: “Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a blowing? Not a speck of light is showing, so the danger must be growing, are the fires of hell a glowing? Is the grizzly reaper mowing? Yes, the danger must be growing, for the rowers keep on rowing, and they’re certainly not showing, any signs that they are slowing.” But then… Everything is fine. Colour returns, and imagination makes happiness and wonder possible. None of it makes sense. But neither does life.
Do you have a favourite track on the album? Impossible to pick?
It changes often… I am proud of them all in different ways, am in awe of the musicians playing on each song. The memory of making them all with Jonathan gives me more joy and appreciation for the connection I have with music and the world.
What do you hope fans get out of your new album?
What I hoped for myself was to lean in to who I am, try and keep trying to move away from judgement; of myself and from the outside. It’s funny… because “leaning in to who I am” really has meant connecting with who I was when I was a child, before outside noise made me feel like I had to be a certain way to please certain people. I don’t wanna be like that anymore. If I’ve got the privilege of having a platform where I can make something that people may find to connect with, I want it to be real. To be true. I hope somebody might have their hand held by this music, I hope that somebody might feel more understood. If I shot for the moon, I’d hope that people might want to lean into who *they* are — in a way that might have made them be burnt at the stake a few hundred years ago.
Your consistency is remarkable — an album almost every two years since 2019. Do you like to work quickly in the studio?
I love music, and I love to create anything when I have the time to. It makes life worth living. ’Cause I wanna be real and not fuck around with this kinda stuff anymore, I’ll be honest — the time I have to play and write music has become exponentially limited as the years have gone on. Extra success creates extra work, the industry is a monster to navigate and I am far away from being a musician that can live sustainably from the music that I make. But there are fragments of time that come out, and they are high octane… the analytic brain that I’ve got in other aspects of my life disappears and it is the release I need and the fuel that makes me keep going. I’m lucky to work with people like Jonathan Wilson who has this same kind of child-like-turbo-chaotic understanding of playing and “playing”. I think people work in different ways, and all of them are awesome… But if I were to deliberate and question ideas and thoughts too much in the process I don’t think I’d make anything,.. or at least, It wouldn’t be as real and embodied. The goal for me is to just be real. My intellectual brain helps this at a certain point, but certainly not when things are a seed.
Which of your albums was the most difficult to put together?
I don’t think that any album is difficult to put together, musically. It’s the thing that we’re the most “confident” in… or maybe the thing we think about the least… The difficult part comes after the album is made and trying to understand how the world looks at you, when you don’t even know how you look at yourself. This album maybe though was the least difficult to put together… I think I’ve reached a point where I am ok with leaning in to who I am, and that’s a hell of a lot easier than worrying about who you are not.
Your vocals always attract a lot of critical praise. When did you first discover that you had a great voice?
When I was a child and my voice shattered all the windows of my family home.
Because of your vocals, do you consider yourself a live performer before a recording artist? Or vice versa?
I love both, I love spontaneity and I think that comes across recording and performing. It means that the live shows aren’t really ever like the record, but change depending on where we are and who we’re playing to and how we feel. So I think everything is considered a live performance for me.
When publications like Pitchfork, us, and NPR praise your music, how does it make you feel? Do you pay much attention to it?
I’m really grateful that my music can reach people and does reach those platforms. It doesn’t feel very real to me sometimes, and I guess I have a gap in the connection of understanding that it is “real”. What I really feel is the connection between us and the the people in the room when I/we play live.
If you had to choose the most notable musical influence on your sound, who would it be and why?
I find that changes often, and I’m in all honesty not very sure. Anybody who I can hear truth in, vulnerability, risk, raw and unsettling exposure of themselves… Some things touch you in a way that you can’t explain. But I really look up to people who take the risk to be themselves.
Looking back, the reaction to Ramona must have been so pleasing?
Ramona feels like it was ten thousand years ago… I feel so much has happened in between that record and this one. I am so incredibly grateful for all the support and connections that came out of that record.
Where are you based these days? Australia?
I’m in Australia, it makes things hard being on this island so far away from international opportunities. But Australia is the most beautiful home and I love my family. I love the birds and the trees and the ocean.
It’s such a tricky time for working musicians like yourself. How have you noticed Australia’s music industry changing over your career? Has it gotten better or worse, in your opinion?
It’s pretty hard. I think sometimes from the outside it might look like things are easy and you’re ticking boxes and living the life… but the changes in the industry make Australian musicians and teams some of the hardest working and self sacrificing people I have ever met. It lets me know that anybody making music and trying to get it out there is doing it because their passion for it is fucking huge and real.
You used to be involved in the Australian theatre scene, is that right? Are you still a big theatre fan?
That is right! I love the theatre and is actually is what I’ve worked on and been involved with for most of my “creative” life. I miss it terribly and I would love to be in it again.
What else is coming up for you in 2026 and beyond?
2026 is touring in AUS, in the US and Europe and the UK. I want to play and make and move and grow as much as I can… Beyond, who knows?
Bloodhorse! by Grace Cummings is available via Virgin Music Australia now.
