For two years, Evelyn Morris – the Melbourne musician behind long-running experimental pop project Pikelet – has been busy on a different stage: as a speaker, writer and figurehead of LISTEN, a group she formed to “cultivate a [feminist] conversation around the experiences of marginalised people in Australian music”. Lyrically, Tronc distills many of the themes Morris has been writing about: self-interrogation, disillusion, being a survivor, being silenced.
Musically, it’s a delight, shedding the weight of her previous full band for a jumble of airy sounds – flurries of piano, castanets, hand-clap flutters, minimal beats – that she corrals into songs with a wand that works when only she waves it. Her recent piano explorations are finding homes in her pop songs too, as on Dear Unimaginables, murmured as if to herself. The despondent campfire strums and untethered verses of Harder, Heart, Harder evoke the lo-fi folk of The Microphones – but after all these years, Pikelet just sounds a lot like Pikelet.
