photo: Adrianne Lenker

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Australian singer-songwriter Indigo Sparke grew up in a musical household, but it wasn’t until after she left acting school in her 20s that she made a go at singing. “I don’t really know if it’s something that I’m fully able to articulate in many ways because I’m in a process of figuring it out myself,” she says, while calling from her home near Woodstock, N.Y. “My songwriting process is very intuitive and spontaneous. Even in my astrological star signs, I have a lot of water in my chart. So I just do better when I’m flowing.”

Sparke has certainly been flowing over the last several years, starting with 2021’s debut album Echo—a gorgeous, sparse, uber personal and confessional collection of modern folk songs. She didn’t want to waste any time in releasing her 2022 follow-up Hysteria, a record that’s bigger in sound, but only in the sense that a bit more is happening musically in each number. She recorded the 14 songs at Long Pond Studios, her producer Aaron Dessner’s Hudson, N.Y.- area space, and later hit the road supporting his band The National.

“His main comment when we were working on the album was that your voice should be front and center all the time. [It] was validating and encouraging for me to embody my voice fully and allow it to be the main thing in the music that people could kind of hold on to, which was something that I had really shied away from.”

Hysteria’s standout tracks take a left turn from the starkness that colored Sparke’s earlier work and instead explore some headier concepts. Tunes like “Pressure in My Chest” and “Why Do You Lie?” mix her lilting voice with a set of more complex arrangements, adding to the LP’s overall wandering feeling. Other cuts like “Blue” and “Pluto” are much more solemn and slow, while “Time Gets Eaten” draws from a country vibe. It’s a leap forward in diversity, certainly—but her voice is the star here.

“I just hear an emotional resonance and an energetic tone because of where I was and, in certain ways, I feel like I’m still partially there,” she says when reflecting on Hysteria. “A part of me is really pushing up against the edge of myself, when informed by all these different kinds of vast, intense emotions that we experience as human beings on this planet.”