Rowena Wise – Bad Things Feel Good*
Australia’s Rowena Wise has announced the August 7 release of her sophomore album, Bad Things Feel Good*.
Home to Oracle Sisters, Cornelia Murr, Flora Hibberd, and Tommy Oeffling, 22Twenty will release the LP – it will mark both Wise’s first release with the label and the first joint release between 22Twenty and Beloved Records. The album 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.
Today, Wise also shares new single “Diamond In The Rough” which explores the darker side of being seen as exceptional, the loneliness of standing on a pedestal you didn’t entirely choose, and the quiet pressure to remain impressive at all costs.
Wise shares: “The idea came after watching a close friend move through an identity crisis. She placed enormous pressure on herself to be extraordinary, to be the most captivating, the most accomplished, the most desired. But when she inevitably fell short of her own impossible standards, she felt alienated and ashamed. The song is an invitation to step down from that self-made pedestal, to pause, to let yourself unravel a little, and to reach toward others on equal footing. We don’t have to be extraordinary to be worthy. We are not special, we are simply enough.” Musically, the track builds on the understated intensity of Wise’s recent work, balancing driven instrumentation with moments of quiet vulnerability, all anchored by her signature poetic storytelling. The single arrives with a video about which Wise notes, “We shot the video in a semi-abandoned warehouse apartment late one Saturday night, improvising most of the dance and camera movements to retain a sense of character rather than a neat dance routine. The concept was inspired by a scene in The Last Showgirl where Jamie Lee Curtis’ character dances in a busy Vegas casino, ignored by passers-by, dejectedly performing slow, powerful dance movements. We aimed to create something similarly melancholic and beautiful – the song’s themes of performance of the self lean into something glamorous, yet dark and human.”
Wise previously shared the album’s “Blood Ties,” a song that confronts inherited silence and the emotional architecture of family. Its release signaled the arrival of a body of work that further cements Wise as one of Australia’s most compelling and emotionally direct voices in indie songwriting.
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.
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