There’s an honest sense of bravery about admitting you still don’t know who you are.
By the time most of us reach adulthood, there is an expectation that we should have begun to settle into ourselves; to know what we want, where we are going, who we love, what we believe, and what kind of person we intend to become. We are encouraged to think of growing up as a process of becoming increasingly certain. And as I speak with Rowena Wise ahead of her latest album release, I learn she has begun to wonder if perhaps it is the opposite.
“I think at this point in my life, I’ve been trying to live a bit more of an examined life in general,” she says. “I’m at an age where sometimes there’s social pressures of having a bit more of a defined sense of self, career and family and community, and I just feel so lost all the time, in a good way. I think I have this childlike view of floating through my life, and and doing the best I can.”
It’s an interesting confession, especially coming from an artist whose music has always seemed so emotionally self-assured. But in listening to Wise’s sophomore album, Bad Things Feel Good*, out now, that distinction begins to make sense. There is no sense that she has arrived at some definitive understanding of herself, but that’s not a bad thing. Rather, she has learned to inhabit the questions and to sit inside the uncomfortable space between knowing and unknowing, tenderness and damage, love and loss, without rushing toward an answer.
The result is an album that feels deeply intimate without ever crossing into being emotionally honest simply for the sake of romanticizing a bleeding heart. Wise has never been afraid of vulnerability, but on Bad Things Feel Good, vulnerability becomes something more nuanced. It is about allowing yourself to remain unresolved. A beautiful reflection of the introspective artist who wrote them.
“Sometimes with my songwriting, it’s very confessional,” Wise says. “I just wanted to hear those songs in the ether. I guess that I felt like I had to write them because it was a therapeutic thing for me. I guess people look to songs as a therapeutic act, like the act of trying to tap into something in the subconscious and trying to make turn the emotional chaos into something abstract, an abstraction that’s relatable and comforting. I guess in writing this album, I needed to hear these songs, and I guess I have to be the one to write them. But I would would have happily just stumbled across someone else’s album in a similar vein and found solace in that. I don’t know. It’s kind of funny. I feel strangely removed from from the process of songwriting, sometimes when I’m really in the flow, like I disappear into it, which is really fun. It’s like entertaining yourself with your own mind is such a weird, wonderful feeling.”
That instinct remains a through line of Wise’s songwriting process. Her songs often begin in a deeply personal space but resist remaining there. She’s not interested in spoon feeding the listener the point of a song. She’d rather give the listener enough room to recognize the feeling, before stepping back and allowing them to find their own way through it.
“I like having this rule of songwriting,” she explains. “I’d like to show a story rather than tell it overtly.”
It is an approach that makes Bad Things Feel Good* feel less like an artist dumping their own emotions onto a listener, and more like someone sitting beside you in the dark, quietly acknowledging that they have been there too. And that sense of companionship may be the album’s greatest gift.
In fact, when I ask Wise what she hopes listeners feel when they listen to the album, she says that they hope they feel “held.” Not fixed. Not enlightened. Simply acknowledged.
“I hope that people feel emotions that they weren’t conscious of [when they listen to the album],” she says. “I hope people feel the way I feel when I listen to my favorite artist. Like they have a close friend that’s sort of there beside them and gently talking to them and holding their hand.”
It is an apt description of an album that deals in heavy things without ever becoming too heavy-handed. Everything is thought through with compassionate effort, making sure every detail of the album strikes the balance of honest yet still a bit existential. For instance, the title, Bad Things Feel Good, is itself a contradiction. Wise knows that. In fact, the contradiction is the point.
“I really liked [the title] because it kind of implies that there’s there’s a very long list of bad things that just feel bad, that don’t feel good,” she explains. “I think it was true for me in the moment when I was going through all these life experiences that were confusing or dark or alienating. In the moment, they just felt bad, and the truth was that bad things felt bad. I like to think more resilience, more gratitude for joy happens after being through some dark, confusing times, the bad things became good, in a way. The pain of growth and change. So both things are true.”
Her debut album, Senseless Acts of Beauty, was released in 2024 and explored loss, alienation and self reinvention. Bad Things Feel Good* arrives somewhere further down the road having obtained a bit more life experience. The songs between the two albums are different from one another, but they belong to the same emotional universe. Each asks what we are supposed to do with the things we can’t neatly resolve. For Wise, songwriting has become one way of making peace with that uncertainty. “I think my instincts with songwriting are to challenge myself with writing about the nuances and the gray areas of human experience,” she says.
Though, as I learned when I spoke to Wise last year ahead of the released of Senseless Acts of Beauty, her natural aptitude for songwriting was simply in her blood. Raised in Margaret River, Western Australia, Wise grew up surrounded by music. Her father used to build guitars by hand. Her mother, a folk musician from Chicago, taught Wise the importance of storytelling. Wise toured with her family as a child before moving to Melbourne at 18 to begin building an artistic life of her own.
That early immersion in songwriting and music as a craft remains audible in the way she writes, as she keeps story at the heart of every song, even if she doesn’t explicitly spell out the moral every time. She manages to blend her folk storytelling roots seamlessly with a sound that marries indie rock, garage pop and alt-folk, all while not being afraid of getting a little messy sonically.
“I like it when artists have a little bit of a different vibe for each album,” she says, pointing to artists such as Angel Olsen as an inspiration. “Not just thematically, but sonically.”
Bad Things Feel Good* is certainly different from Senseless Acts of Beauty, but not in a way that suggests a total departure. Rather, it feels like the next natural step up. If the first album asked how you rebuild yourself after being broken open, the second asks a more difficult question: what happens when you realize there may not be a finished version of yourself waiting on the other side?
The answer, Wise proposes, is you simply keep going, settled into the uncertainty. Her lyrics suggest that she’s adopted the mentality that maybe the point is not to emerge from every difficult experience transformed. Sometimes simply recognizing a glimmer of oneself in the midst of the chaos and pain is enough. And that is what makes Bad Things Feel Good such a sleeper emotional sucker-punch of record. Wise isn’t looking to offer listeners certainty. That wouldn’t be an honest offering. Instead, she offers something much more compassionate: acknowledgment of the human condition.
She writes about the strange places where love and pain overlap, where family can be both refuge and source of inherited wounds, where growth can feel less like becoming someone new and more like unlearning who you thought you were supposed to be. She writes about the ways we hurt each other, the ways we hold on, and the ways we eventually have to let go, all while inviting the listener bring their own memories or experiences to the song, making her music refreshingly human.
Because if we took a step back and were honest with ourselves, most of us would probably admit that we don’t really know what we are doing. We simply get better, perhaps, at trying our best to fumble through this strange life.
For Rowena Wise, that admission has become a kind of artistic freedom, allowing uncertainty to become something to sit with and to look at closely, to write about, and maybe even to find beauty inside.
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