Alex the Astronaut’s songs have always skirted the line between charming and mawkish. They brim with references to pop culture and the minutiae of existence, painting – either in painstaking or painful detail – diaristic vignettes of falling in and out of love, growing older (though not necessarily wiser), and zipping back and forth between continents.
The best and best-known example is her 2017 track Not Worth Hiding. In it, the Australian singer-songwriter – born and now based in Sydney, after stints in London and New York – recounts her adolescent experience of queerness, sizing up boys and trying on dresses while secretly harbouring feelings for girls. At any other point in time, the single could’ve chugged along slowly with its folksy strums and unadorned vocals, telling a sweet – though perhaps unremarkable – story of self-discovery. But in the midst of a torturous federal referendum, it went gangbusters, becoming a torch song for marriage equality.
“It’s not worth hiding if you got something to say,” Alex the Astronaut (real name Alexandra Lynn) proselytises on the chorus. “And it’s not worth hiding if you think you might be gay.” The line, sure, resembles a cheesy slogan from a bygone era, but in 2017, it also provided a glimmer of much-needed levity amid a quagmire of vitriol. (Elton John called the lyrics “fabulous” on his Beats 1 radio show.)
That earnestness is a double-edged sword on Lynn’s second album, How to Grow a Sunflower Underwater. “Some of the songs feel like … scrolling back through your social media,” she told Guardian Australia about her debut record in 2020, and the same holds true here as she plumbs her personal archives to excavate tales which, at their best, ooze with exhilarating, wine-drunk intimacy.
Album closer and recent single Haircut is the crown jewel, bottling the life-changing magic of a makeover into an anthem of gender affirmation. Like Not Worth Hiding, it surges from personal recollections into a truly galvanising chorus designed for shouting at full volume. “Since I cut my hair, I’ve been feeling so much better,” Lynn cries out over a stampede of guitar, the word “better” becoming an exuberant, arms-outstretched howl to the heavens. “It was more than that / Now the mirror looks back / And I feel like who I am supposed to.”
Haircut’s production tricks – the result of a collaboration with members from Ball Park Music, who also co-produced Lynn’s first album – feel delightfully kitschy, as homespun as a backyard buzzcut. There might be a kazoo in there (or so it sounds, tinny and gleeful), and the familiar chirp of a Sydney pedestrian crossing – a sample so brain-tingling it also made its way into Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy. Lynn has a knack for these samples, which elevate otherwise conventional indie-folk arrangements into earworms. Similarly goofy are are the effects on Octopus – a track about Lynn’s autism diagnosis – which include everything from the pop of watery bubbles to spacey bleeps and bloops. It’s a reminder that each of us can conjure childlike wonder from everyday experiences if only we look hard enough.
The mundane, on these tracks, is elevated with humour and fantasy, but elsewhere, it can be frustratingly tedious, verging on singer-songwriter parody. “My four roommates and I watched Desperate Housewives,” she relays on Haunted, and later in the song: “We went to teppanyaki and we laughed at eggs fly.” The specificity of the writing, far from revealing, comes across as cloying instead, syllables crammed in uncomfortably like an afterthought. The song South London – ostensibly an ode to Lynn’s freewheeling childhood in the UK – namechecks Heathrow, Kings Cross and the London Bridge, imparting all the emotion of a Tripadvisor listicle. The worst offender comes on Airport as Lynn starts playing music in her car: “And the song that played was Phoebe Bridgers / I turned it off cos I was jealous I didn’t make it.”
These lyrics, over the course of How to Grow a Sunflower Underwater, snowball into a barrage of references which feel less like glimpses into Lynn’s idiosyncratic quirks and more like cultural debris – an onslaught of information too thick and fast to process. When she does find moments of pause, they are often given misplaced emphasis, like on To Be Something Good, a track which reaches for searing polemics as it catalogues all the woes of the world – bushfires, torrential rain, a terrorist attack – but can only offer a sentimental salve: “If I put out my hand, would you hold it?”
How To Grow A Sunflower Underwater by Alex the Astronaut is out now
