Howdy lovely frankie folk, tunesday is here again! We have a yarn with Grace Robinson of Empress and chat about the Aussie music scene, as well as how the pandemic helped the band narrow down their sound. 

You’re the proud poster child of Empress today! Yeah, I feel very privileged.

How would you describe yourself and what you do? Well, I’m Grace Robinson and I'm one of the three singers of Empress, alongside Stella Dunai and Matilda Pungitore. We also have bassist Noah Hutchinson, drummer Matt Dooley and keyboardist Christy Wozitsky-Jones.

How did you first discover your sound? Well, five out of six of us went to high school together, which is really cute. We all started to reconnect and chat about music together, where we all had big creative dreams with starting a band together and performing live and then all of a sudden, pandemic. We had two solid years of nothing but writing and figuring out what we want Empress to be and as soon as lockdown ended, we just exploded.

Did the pandemic help you with creative inspiration? It really sucked, but there's a lot of positives that came out of it for us. It really gave us time. It's sort of like going through puberty whenever you start a band, you have to have your early awkward live shows. But, with the pandemic, we got to do that all privately which is kind of nice. It meant that when we did come out after the pandemic, we came out with a really refined idea of what we wanted to be.

Who are some of your biggest inspirations, musical or otherwise? We’re super into early James Blake stuff and he's often a big person that we circle back to. Tune-Yards is a big reason that Empress exists, because their music is so big and powerful but it’s also weird, they use their voices in such different ways. We also all love Doja Cat, she's just so great. I think she's such a great composer and producer. I think when you're a girl in a music group in any sort of way, having other women to look up to is huge.

What are your least favourite and most favourite parts of the music industry? It really is such a boy’s club. Almost every festival or music event you always see the same six bands, which are made up of six white men doing pretty much the same thing. Women are tokenised and used to look like bands are super-woke because they have a female member, but it doesn’t feel there’s a lot of exposure on any female-led bands. But I love community radio. I still think that they are the reason for so many emerging bands and musos gaining success.

Talk to me about your debut album, Daughter. How exciting! Daughter is 10 track album of songs that we wrote, some of them we wrote a long time ago and some of them written were very recently. We ended up getting all the raw tracks and flipping them, like taking stuff out of sessions, distorting some sounds, putting in a weird thing here or there and it ended up being the final cut. This album was birthed on the female experience and how women see the world.