Rowena Wise – Home In This World
Today, Australia-based artist Rowena Wise shares her new single “Home In This World,” via 22Twenty/Beloved Records.
The track is the the third offering from her forthcoming sophomore album, Bad Things Feel Good*, set for release on August 7.
Following the emotional reckoning of earlier singles “Blood Ties” and the quiet unravelling of “Diamond In The Rough,” today’s song enters gentler, more expansive terrain, turning its gaze skyward to sit with the ache of feeling small and alone in the universe, and the awe of realising you are part of everything.
Wise shares: “I wrote this song to honour the part of me that sometimes feels utterly alone in the universe, and how that loneliness can feel both heavy and strangely beautiful. I often feel that the world is driven by chaos. We’re born into it, shaped by it, moving along paths that intersect with countless others in ways that feel accidental and unplanned. So much of life seems to unfold without inherent meaning. That lack of control has, at times, left me feeling alienated, like I’m drifting within something vast and indifferent.”
But rather than resist, the song settles into that solitude. As Wise explains: “The song emerged when I stopped resisting that feeling and allowed it to settle gently. Instead of fighting the loneliness, I tried to understand it. I began to accept that purpose isn’t something we’re born with, it’s something we create. That realization is both terrifying and profound. To face your existence at face value, without a grand narrative attached, requires a kind of quiet courage.”
Further cementing Wise as one of Australia’s most compelling and emotionally direct voices in indie songwriting, Bad Things Feel Good* is a tender, point-blank look at the pain of transformation, and what it means to be flesh and blood. It defines love and selfhood as a mosaic of light and dark, where the rules of negotiating desire, responsibility, devotion, and self-authenticity no longer hold. Through candid poetic lyricism and raw live band production, the songs explore themes of heartbreak, estrangement and mental health, grounding the complexities of the human experience with relatability and emotional depth.
Written over the last couple of years of Wise’s extensive touring schedule, Bad Things Feel Good* was carved out of her own and her friends’ experiences of navigating the nuances of complicated relationships and mental health. The feeling of displacement that came with travelling so often allowed her some perspective on the knottier growing pains of adulthood, love that deviates, longing that is existential, and moral vertigo. Wise wrote the album from a place of exploring intimacy in its many forms, romantic, familial, communal, and the quiet inheritances we carry from them.
Where Wise’s previous album, Senseless Acts of Beauty (2024) – shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize and described by CLASH Magazine as “carefully etched indie folk” – explored love, loss and the slow rebuilding of self, this new record traces the uncomfortable in-between: the knowing and the unknowing, the harm and the pleasure, the tenderness and the damage that can exist in the same breath. There are parents who loved imperfectly, partners who loved too much or not enough, and selves that are slowly shedding old skins. Again and again, the characters in these songs are caught between what feels good and what is good, asking whether growth must always arrive through suffering, and whether love can exist without possession, silence, or sacrifice.
Wise reflects: “I thought I had metabolised the growing pains of adulthood in the last decade. In reality, I’ve been wobbling on a pedestal of ‘overcoming’ that I created. I have been careless with my heart, dishonest to myself about what I want and who I am. Now I don’t know who I am, but I do know that I just want to be human, to be at peace with the messiness of life without continuing to try to tell a clean, novel story about it.”
Produced by Rob Muinos (Julia Jacklin, Didirri) and recorded at The Ratshack in Collingwood over three days with a live band, Richard Bradbeer on bass, Jess Ellwood on drums and Matt Dixon on pedal steel guitar, the album holds space rather than demands attention. Their tight, organic instrumentation moves with patience and restraint, allowing Wise’s live vocal captures to soar, then crumble in the delicate moments.
At its core, Bad Things Feel Good* is not a confession or a redemption arc. It is an honest reckoning with complexity. It acknowledges the mess, the legacy of blood ties, the weight of attachment, the seduction of self-betrayal, while refusing to flatten human experience into neat conclusions. Bad Things Feel Good* invites you to stand at the edge of something: looking back at who you were, forward at who you might become, and down into the uneasy space where desire, love, and truth collide.
Rowena Wise Tour Dates
10/15 – — Melbourne (VIC) — Howler
10/16 – Castlemaine (VIC) — The Bridge Hotel
10/23 – Sydney (NSW) — The Vanguard
10/24 – Thirroul (NSW) — Thirroul Railway Hotel
10/29 – Brisbane (QLD) — Black Bear Lodge
10/30 – Mapleton (QLD) — Mapleton Pub
11/13 – Hobart (TAS) — Altar Bar
11/20 – Fremantle (WA) — Mojo’s (solo)
More dates to be announced
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