Anglesea-inspired album explores the hidden tensions beneath the Surf Coast dream

FROM empty holiday homes to streets that sit dark for much of the year, folk singer-songwriter Leah Senior’s latest album Pt. Roadknight draws on the realities of life on the Surf Coast.

Written and recorded while living in a beach shack near Anglesea on the Great Ocean Road, the album explores both the region’s natural beauty and the social changes reshaping many coastal communities.

One of the album’s most pointed tracks, Two Weeks, reflects on coastal gentrification and the rise of largely unoccupied holiday homes in regional towns.

“We had a home recording studio in our little shack and then the neighbours decided to tear down the cute thing and cover their bush block with this giant grey house,” Senior said.

“It was extremely noisy.

“So I wrote a particular song whilst listening to the builders making all of this noise and just reflecting on the fact that once they finished, the house would just stand empty.

“And it’s a song called Two Weeks, meaning, two weeks of the year is how long people are occupying these kinds of houses.”

Senior said her songwriting generally begins with lived experience and a strong lyrical instinct.

“My writing style is that I generally write from experience, like everything has to mean something for me,” she said.

“I’m a lyric person.”

That grounding in experience extends to the natural world, which has long shaped her folk sensibility.

“I feel like a lot of the writing is anchored in nature,” she said.

“And that’s my tendency as well.”

She said the shifting rhythms of the Surf Coast also shaped the emotional structure of the album, which moves between stark introspection and renewal.

“Half the record is kind of introspective and lonely,” Senior said.

“I was living at that beach shack, and it was freezing.

“So part of the record is like this introspective dialogue. It’s lonely and kind of depressed.

 

“And then the other half of the record, it’s kind of like pre-antidepressants and post-antidepressants.

“It’s seasonal – there’s winter and then there’s spring, which is coming back out and feeling good again.”

Living outside Melbourne also shifted her creative instincts, giving her space to work without external pressure.

“I feel like there’s a sense of freedom when you get out of the city and you feel like you’ve just come out of a spell,” Senior said.

“I felt like there was more freedom in my musicality just through being out, being on my own and just following my own direction rather than being so influenced by all the people around me.”

That sense of distance is also reflected in Softly, Once Again, a tongue-in-cheek song that gently critiques Melbourne’s punk music scene and the pressure on artists to constantly amplify themselves.

“It’s a cheeky little song. It starts off with the line, ‘So many punk bands in this town’,” Senior said.

“It’s just a bit of a joke about the oversaturation of punk music in Melbourne and how in some ways to me, I feel like it’s more punk to do things softly, and to not have to fight this incredibly noisy world, and just go off and do things in secret and not have to post about it.

“There’s a lot of those themes on the record of just like, it’s okay to just go off and do your own thing.”

While the Surf Coast’s beauty runs through much of the album, Senior said living in a seasonal beach town also revealed a quieter side of coastal life.

“It’s such an outrageously beautiful place that it’s the kind of place where you just step outside and you’re immediately taken out of yourself,” she said.

“So in that way it’s beautiful… and it was kind of isolating in that it’s a surf town.”

“The population explodes over summer and then for most of the year, we were the only ones with the lights on in our street and the whole street was so quiet.

“That was in some ways a really beautiful experience, but it led to some introspective writing.”

Leah Senior will perform at Martians Saloon in Deans Marsh on 25 July. Tickets are available via Humanitix.

PANCHO SYMES