Angie McMahon

Angie McMahon’s 2017 debut single, “Slow Mover,” doubled as an apt descriptor of her work to come: unhurried indie-rock dirges smoldering with emotion. (“Missing Me” was another cathartic showcase for McMahon’s vivid, quaking vocals and foreboding guitar-gnashing.) The Melbourne songwriter (born in 1994) has poured just as much feeling into a surprising array of covers, reshaping classics by Neil Young, Bonnie Tyler, and even ABBA to slot in closer to her own emotional frequency. Six years after scoring her first serious break—winning a contest to tour with Bon Jovi around Australia—McMahon released her 2019 debut album, Salt. She revisited some of those songs in stark piano mode the following year, leaning even further into her trademark slow-burn approach. Most notably, she transforms Salt’s skeletal closing track, “If You Call,” into a hushed, stunning duet with Canada’s Leif Vollebekk. With as much earnestness and intentionality, McMahon set her diaristic confessions against a more spacious, cinematic backdrop on 2023’s Light, Dark, Light Again. In creating airy anthems that pit brutal self-awareness against radical self-love, McMahon found that both are crucial in understanding herself and her work. “I realized that I had some things to learn about projection,” she told Apple Music, “and that everything I write is actually about myself.”