FRITZ - Pastel (2021)

Newcastle musician FRITZ is someone we've had the utmost pleasure of watching grow and evolve over the last few years. When we first met back in 2018, she was a fresh-faced addition to Australia's indie-pop world showcasing her charm through Biggest Fool in the World, an early single that would immediately place FRITZ amongst ones-to-watch lists across the country (including ours). She's delivered on that too; single after single since showing different facets of FRITZ's guitar-soaked sound, and the personality and songwriting that bridges together all of her work.

With a sound drenched in nostalgia and storytelling, FRITZ - real name Tilly Murphy - has this certain youthful energy to her music that really encapsulates why she's a musician so worth paying attention to. Melodically, her work feels like a hazy, washed-out dream that shines with this technicolour sheen; a sense of polish and grace that sneaks through even in the most DIY, rough-around-the-edges moments her music often moves into. Then, there's what she sings about, and how she brings us into her world with the same charming personality that made her such an exciting force from day-dot.

Now, with her newly-minted sophomore album Pastel, we're seeing these two sides come together, and it feels like a moment that exactly shows the strengths of FRITZ and why she's such a beckoning force both in the present and the future. Arriving via Inertia Music, Pastel is a tasteful nine tracks that present the core of FRITZ's sound and how she's able to mould and shape her sound into different musical dimensions, floating between capsules of alt-pop that range between the more subtle and intimate, right through to those that crunch with that aforementioned roughness that captures the raw passion of her work.

Pastel shines in both of those areas. The album-opening Sweetie, for example, dances with a soft sense of hope amongst a backdrop of nostalgic bittersweetness about growing up, while the song that immediately follows - Arrow - moves with a far heavier crunch, with more focused and pointed lyricism influencing the song right down to its grittier sound. The hazy tapestry of guitar, bass and percussion form of the backbone of these songs and the entire record, but their intensity come and go depending on what's happening in the context of them; the bite of FRITZ's songwriting showing right down to the album's production, too.

The different energies that live within Pastel are a testament to FRITZ's continued sense of growth; something that - as we mentioned - has been definitive in making her an excitable force amongst the saturation of 2021 alt-pop. You can feel FRITZ grow - musically, personally, emotionally - across the course of the nine tracks and how they exist amongst her past work, especially contrastingly to the breakthrough Biggest Fool In The World brought all those years ago. FRITZ has come a long way, and Pastel is proof of that.

"I started writing this album 3 years ago. It reflects my growth musically and personally over the past three years," FRITZ says on the record, doubling down on the sense of evolution that we just mentioned. "It’s a body of work that truly represents my becoming of a young adult from a teenager."

Take a dive into the record below, alongside a track by track walkthrough that sees FRITZ dissect the album and its lyrics one song at a time.