Melbourne music industry champion Emily Ulman steps back into the spotlight with Severe Clear, her first solo album in a decade.
After years of championing others through her work with Brunswick Music Festival, the award-winning Isol-Aid, and ALWAYS LIVE, Emily Ulman is finally turning the focus back to her own artistry.
Severe Clear blends folk, acoustic and pop elements with striking emotional clarity, produced by Bonnie Knight and featuring collaborators including Gab Strum from Japanese Wallpaper. The album moves from intimate ballads to cinematic folk moments, all grounded in Emily’s rich, heart-first storytelling. From the shimmering title track to the delicate Every Hillside and footy-loving Fans in the Stands, Severe Clear is a collection that resonates with the same warmth, resilience and generosity Emily has poured into Melbourne’s music community throughout her career.
Emily Ulman has shared with Beat an exclusive track-by-track breakdown of Severe Clear, offering insights into the stories and inspirations behind each song.
Keep up with the latest music news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
Severe Clear
The title track borrows its name from an aviation term describing skies so cloudless and dazzling that pilots describe them as being almost blinding. I love the idea that something seemingly flawless can also carry a sense of danger. It’s a song about clarity, about love found in the mundane, and the overwhelming beauty that can come with both. I wanted to weave small domestic details with a sense of awe, landing (pun intended) on the idea of home as both comfort and revelation.
Every Hillside
Every Hillside is a song for the thinkers. It is a song for the overthinkers, the ones who hold on too tightly, who notice every nuance, who ask the questions and find every freckle but are not always seen in return. It is about fighting for what matters, even when the battle is one-sided, and feeling so deeply that every hill feels worth dying on. Some things stick with you long after you walk away. Some things never do.
Fans in the Stands
Fans in the Stands is about my love for the Western Bulldogs and the AFL/W, and at the same time about the weight of a loved one being sick in hospital. There was a period where I would walk to the games among streams of fans heading to the ground and back again, and it mirrored my walk to a hospital bedside and home again. The Mexican wave, the fireworks rising and falling, even the noise of the crowd, all echoed that rhythm. I felt surrounded and anonymous in the stands, and exposed and unprepared in the hospital. On stage I can play a role and recite a script and feel protected by the part I play, and then I step off into feeling bare and unprepared.
View this post on Instagram
Mountains Mountains Mountains
I love the Japanese proverb, ‘The reverse side has a reverse side.’ Nothing is ever just one thing. Beneath every surface, there is something else waiting to be seen; it reminds us to look deeper, to question first impressions. Mountains Mountains Mountains is about the beauty and the rot, about pleasure and grief, and how even the most pristine places carry traces of what came before. We live in the layers. In what is visible, what is hidden, and the quiet charge in between.
This song came out of a moment that felt both intimate and expansive. A parked car. A sweeping view. A private undoing. It’s about renewal, about sexuality, about finding awe in the aftermath. There’s tension in it. Between what’s pristine and what’s overgrown. The beauty lives not in the separation, but in the merging of the two to become something new.
Trundle
Thanks to my parents, I grew up listening to and reading the greats. Woody Guthrie, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary. Emily Dickinson, Pete Seeger, Billie Holiday. Protest singers, poets, storytellers. My first memories of trying to understand the world came through prose and song as politics. These writers taught me to ask better questions.
Trundle came from that place. On the surface it’s a song about what holds you up and what holds you back. A trundle, a bunk-bed, the rudimentary mechanics of childhood furniture; the earliest foundations. But it’s also about the people you hoped would hold you, support you, and instead burn you to ash. Support that is conditional, invisible, or suddenly gone.
Much like Every Hillside, it’s about the battles you choose and the moments you choose them in. Where you sit, when you stand, and what you’re willing to say out loud. And what you’re too tired to keep saying. And much like Mountains Mountains Mountains, it lives in the grey. The two sides of the Maribyrnong River as both backdrop and witness. I am the momentary observer, watching the reckoning flow that will carry on long after I’ve turned to ash.”
View this post on Instagram
Lake Mistake
Lake Mistake is a song I wrote about hesitation and uncertainty. It is about the weight of giving too much of yourself away, whether to a job or to a loved one, and being so close and intertwined in a situation that it becomes hard to see clearly. The lake itself is a metaphor for the mistakes you fear you might be driving straight into and at the same time hope to avoid. It is about changing course or taking the long way around, about how closeness can blur objectivity, and about the smudges between clarity and confusion. Sometimes we choose to sit inside the question marks rather than make a choice and risk a mistake.
Planned Burn
My family live in regional Victoria, where in the cooler months you can smell and see council and property owners burning vegetation and bushfire-prone growth. I wrote this song about the idea of destruction as a form of renewal. A controlled fire clears space for new growth, and to me that mirrors relationships and memory. Sometimes we need to let something burn down in order to see what might grow back, or to make peace with what is gone.
Liminal Spaces
Liminal Spaces is a song about desire, infatuation and the strange in-between states that come with living in the unreality of obsession. I wanted to take that teenage-style confession of having a crush and stretch it into something more raw and more adult, where longing turns into both obsession and vulnerability. The “liminal space” here is the gap between restraint and abandon, between wanting and having, between the reality of knowing someone and the version of them you create in your head. It is about how thrilling and unnerving it feels to sit in that tension, and also about wanting someone so desperately that you are happy to share them and take whatever part of them they are willing to offer.
Toughest Tourniquet
Toughest Tourniquet is a duet. I love duets and set out to write one for my album that feels like two people wrestling with the same connection. The song is about knowing that what binds you together is also strangling you, and that the very thing that feels protective and connecting can also be suffocating. Because both voices sing the same words, it becomes unclear whether they are opposites or mirrors, whether they are too different to work or too alike to let go.
If It Isn’t True
I wrote this song when I heard about the death of my friend Mike Noga. We used to play shows together and I was so shocked by the news that I hoped it wasn’t true. Writing was my immediate reaction, the only way I could try to process it. The song circles through that denial, bargaining and longing; imagining gigs and drinks and soundchecks that could still happen if only it wasn’t true. It is a song of grief, disbelief and love for a friend I miss. I miss you so much, Mike.
Repeat Things
Repeat Things is a song about ritual, longing and the way we circle back through the same patterns. I wrote it about a particular New Year’s Eve, riding bikes between parties in the heat with someone I was seeing at the time. I was thinking about the practises and customs we repeat, and how the turning of the calendar can feel both significant and just the same as any other night and any other year. It is about intimacy and distance, about reaching for a hand that feels both familiar and unfamiliar, and about how repetition can be comforting or haunting. Wanting to be close while also retreating. Sometimes we repeat things to master them, sometimes to hold on, sometimes simply because we cannot help ourselves. It is all we know.
Find out more here.
