Queenie may have begun as an alter ego emerging from the ashes of heart break, with Pleasance, Queenie is no longer stepping into a persona, she is stepping into herself. Fully realised, fully present, and having claimed her throne.

Forget what you’ve heard about Queenie and actually listen. Her music has never sat comfortably within the confines of genre, whilst you can find folk, country and art pop within her sound, it is so much more than that. Her sophomore album, Pleasance, defies something far more elusive than categorisation and certainly denies expectation. What emerges instead is a body of work that feels less like a statement and more like a state, one of clarity, of stillness, of hard-won emotional coherence. Listening to Pleasance is like entering a verdant walled garden with flowers of diverse beauty. 

Having cut her teeth on the festival scene at Panama, Beyond the Valley and Party in the Paddock, Queenie’s live shows are a growing tour de force of professionalism laced with a hint of punk, whether that is embracing the aesthetic of a giant prawn or providing vocals for the punk band Private Function. Queenie has always invited guests in with her charming and disarming stage presence, but her latest release takes that intimacy and connection one step further.

Pleasance, arriving in August 2026, is a record of striking depth and quiet authority. Where her debut New Moult introduced an artist in the midst of shedding, rupturing, and reconfiguring, earning a place in the ARIA Top 20 and establishing Queenie as one of Australia’s most compelling new voices, Pleasance is the sound of integration. This evolution arrives alongside a growing body of industry recognition. Queenie’s songwriting has already garnered national attention, with her single Not Divine shortlisted for APRA Song of the Year. 

Traversing a rich terrain that moves from lush pop into expansive alternative rock, the album is anchored by Queenie’s voice, which oscillates between power and restraint with deliberate precision. There is a density to the record, layers that reveal themselves slowly, harmonies that fold in on themselves, recalling the mechanical vocoder layering of Imogen Heap whilst retaining very human harmonies found in the 1960s Wall of Sound. Within this, there are also softer, pastoral moments where Queenie draws from a distinctly British folk lineage, her quieter passages echoing the spectral intimacy of Sandy Denny, allowing space, air, and fragility to surface.

If Pleasance has a defining quality, it is its serenity. The serenity is not passive or disengagement, but something radical. It is the conclusion of survival that emerges after years of volatility. As Queenie moves through breathing space and tranquility to epic crescendos, the interplay, between restraint and release, between intimacy and scale, gives the record its dynamic tension.

This duality is crystallised in its standout singles. Pearl Necklaces arrives with a sharp, tongue in cheek bite, a subversive, swaggering moment that cuts through the album’s softness with wit and precision, skewering ego and entitlement with a knowing smirk. In contrast, Vivid drifts in the opposite direction, suspended and luminous, capturing the fragile beauty of a dream realised and the quiet desperation to remain within it. Together, they articulate the album’s breadth, its ability to hold both irreverence and reverence, clarity and illusion.

That is not to say the album is without its shadows. Pleasance does not erase the past, it learns and accepts from it. There are moments of confrontation, of unflinching honesty, where Queenie revisits the formative experiences that shaped her, from instability and trauma to the physical limitations imposed by chronic illness. Yet even in these darker passages, there is a shift in perspective. These stories are no longer sites of entrapment, but of authorship. They are held, examined, and ultimately reframed within a broader narrative of growth.

There is a cinematic quality to Pleasance, and Queenie is known for the evocative world she can create within a song. Many of the tracks feel like they belong to the closing moments of a film, those suspended, luminous sequences where resolution and ambiguity coexist. Queenie has long drawn from visual storytelling, and here it manifests as a record that feels immersive in the truest sense, less a collection of songs than a fully realised world. The songs are vignettes of landscapes, undulating with instrumental texture and detail, influenced by her rural Tasmanian upbringing and echoed in the album’s construction. It was recorded in a small church, surrounded by greener pastures.

There is also, crucially, a shift in how Queenie situates herself within the broader musical landscape. Long misaligned with reductive genre labels, she moves here toward something more expansive, drawing subtle parallels with artists who operate at scale without sacrificing intimacy. There are echoes of the mythic storytelling of Kate Bush, the textural depth of Bon Iver, and the emotional magnitude of Florence Welch. Yet these are not references that confine, but ones that illuminate her reach.

Ultimately, Pleasance is a record about coming home, not to a place, but to a self. It is about finding peace not in the absence of complexity, but in the acceptance of it. The album’s title itself gestures toward this, a secluded garden, a private enclosure where beauty is allowed to exist alongside the wider, messier world.