Chloe Alison Escott - Stars Under Contract (2020)

For the last 12 years, Chloe Alison Escott has been best known as the vocalist of Tasmanian post-punk duo The Native Cats. She would often be seen on stage engaged in a postmodern kind of shoe-gazing, manipulating synthesisers on a Nintendo 3DS while bandmate Julian Teakle produced basslines in a shotgun pattern, matching the rhythmic shout of Escott’s literary-punk vocals. But over the years, a career-spanning collection of unrecorded songs accumulated in a corner of Escott’s brain. Something seemed trite in scraping together another punk group to record and tour them – this was different material. A strange, emboldening idea occurred to Escott: why didn’t she just pretend these songs already existed in classic, definitive form and “rerecord” them as with just a piano to hand? Escott imagined herself as John Cale in 1992 recording his live album ‘Fragments Of A Rainy Season’ – making sense of an eight-record solo career, for a one-night-only intimate piano concert. The result - her solo debut album, ‘Stars Under Contract’.