INTERVIEW: Sara Berki on her second EP for 2025, Outrun: “Things are happening for me because I really don’t slow down”

Words: Emma Driver
Interview: Shalane Connors
Published: 28 November 2025

Australia’s Sara Berki is one of the hardest working country artists around. Nominated for two awards at the 2026 Golden Guitars – including Female Artist of the Year, no less – Berki has just released her second EP of the year. After the full-band production of In the Neon in the middle of 2025 (see our July interview and review), she’s followed it up with Outrun, an acoustic-tilted EP that showcases more of Berki’s strong songwriting and clear-as-a-bell delivery.

With no room to hide behind a band, acoustic performances shine a light on the songwriting and musicianship of artists, and Outrun is the perfect showcase of what Berki is capable of. When she toured In the Neon this year, she performed two sets a night – one acoustic, and one with the full band – and those stripped-back sets inspired Outrun. The expertly crafted stories on the EP stand on their own without a full band to prop them up, and of course Berki’s voice does some heavy lifting, emotionally charged yet carefully deployed to bring the most out of her writing. Four tracks were written solo by Berki, and one collaboratively – it’s clear she’s honing her work with every release. All this, and she’s still a relative newcomer to the Australian country scene. “I just want to keep momentum and keep going,” she tells us in the interview below.

Outrun opens with the title track, a delicate song about a woman who will not be controlled: “I was a rock that wanted to roll / And nothing changed since then / You can’t keep me locked in.” The slow-tempo arrangement – guitar, banjo, minimal percussion, strings rising and falling – brings a thoughtful air, suggesting this is someone who has suffered at the hands of others and is quietly making a stand: “Try and catch me all you want, but I ain’t one to outrun,” Berki sings.

Single ‘Porch Light’ is up next, slow too, opening with a minor key and a plaintive fiddle line. “‘Porch Light’ was a hard song to write because it came from a place that was all too familiar to me; a relationship that is just not working but is too hard to leave,” Berki said on the song’s release. This one’s even more sparse – guitar and percussion for the beat, fiddle weaving in and out, a subtle bass – and it frames Berki’s rush of words: “It’s a fucked-up thing to love like we do / But no one has to understand it.” Difficult love is expertly captured, and Berki holds back on the vocal to let the story shine through.

‘Happy House’ dips back into childhood imagery, a moving portrait of a little girl with a terrible home life who escapes into dreams of something better. Berki’s voice is at the fore, the guitar picked to give sparseness to the arrangement. “In her happy house, there’s no heartache / The bruises down her leg,” Berki sings, gently, giving glimpses into the alcoholism and violence of this young girl’s home. It’s a quiet song but its message is amplified.

‘Lily of the Valley’ is Berki’s writing collaboration with two Nashville writers, Brandon Hood and Billy Montana. There’s a pace and an urgency to this murder ballad, its minor key setting the tone for the tragic story unfolding over three verses. ‘Outrun’ has an undercurrent of women being controlled, but ‘Lily of the Valley’ lays out the ravaging consequences. No spoilers on what happens – you just have to listen. It’s three minutes of tight storytelling, and it’s well worth putting down whatever you’re doing and sinking into its atmosphere.

Then the closing track – a cowboy love song, but with an edge. ‘Heaven & Hell’ is like the dark side to In the Neon’s ‘Cowboys Do It Better’. Here, good girl from Oklahoma meets irresistible bad boy – what could be clearer than a line like, “He lit me up and smoked me like that damn cigarette”? Again, that edge of melancholy that Berki gives her stories brings a reflective air to the song. This time, though, her character knows exactly what she’s getting herself into, and that her heart will be “a mess” when she tangles with this smoking hot stranger. There’s no outro, just the ringing phrase “This is heaven and hell” from Berki to close the song, and the EP. She leaves us with an open ending – how far into heaven or hell will this good girl descend?

All these songs show how Berki can more than hold her own in a stripped-down format, and that she’s not afraid of difficult themes, taking tragedy and sorrow and weaving them into stories that feel real, even when she’s creating characters whose lives are far away from her own. The core of emotion always feels authentic, and Berki knows exactly how to deliver it.

Just before the release of Outrun, Berki talked with Women In Pop’s Shalane Connors, giving insights into the EP and her determination to keep up the momentum.

Hi Sara! Last time we spoke was only four months ago, and you had just released In the Neon, and now you’re releasing your follow-up EP Outrun. It could not be more different. But before we jump into that, how have things been touring with In the Neon?

It’s been really good. In the Neon was a piece of work that I really just wanted to show my diversity … that more-produced, hotter kind of sound that is quite big in Nashville. It’s a modern kind of sound, and I love that I was able to show that side of me. It’s been so fun to play the songs live with a band … There’s nothing quite like playing a song that is brought to life when it’s played live. Like ‘Do Me Too’ – it just takes it to that next level. It’s been so good.

And you’ve just been nominated for two Golden Guitar Awards, for Female Artist of the Year and Toyota New Talent. Congratulations! What do recognition and accolades like these mean to an artist like you?

It’s huge. As a kid, I wasn’t taken to Tamworth, whereas I feel a lot of artists in country music were brought into the country music scene quite early, especially if their parents were listening to Australian country music. It was just never something that I knew about. Also, it’s quite common for Australian country artists to have gone through the CMAA Academy as well. It’s something that Tamworth offers. I just didn’t have that, so I guess I’m still quite the newcomer, and I understand that – I know my place. But I feel like when you get recognition for things that you do, that’s just a bonus … the fact of actually having the industry acknowledge you for what you’re doing is a whole other level. I’m quite shocked, because I’m in there with people who have been doing this for the past ten to fifteen years, since they were in their teens.

Well, everyone else just needs to keep up with you …

There’s stuff to do! Things are happening for me because I really don’t slow down. You tell me to do something – I’ll do the complete opposite. If someone tells me to just take a break, that doesn’t [register] to me. I’m not listening to what you’re saying. And I’m so ready to always have the music ready. I’m like a bull out of a gate, seriously. And I think that that’s just how I work – with momentum and not slowing down.

Outrun, your new EP, is the absolute flip side to In the Neon. It’s raw, vulnerable and melancholy. Do you have different feelings upon releasing this EP than you did with In the Neon? Does it feel more vulnerable to release this material?

Yeah, I think so. There’s some songs in here that I’ve been keeping in the vault, as I do with a lot of my other songs. I had to endure so many different emotions and feelings to write an EP like this. I guess if you were to ask me what Outrun is about, truly, it’s about something that I had to go through, and it hurt so much, but I think it brought me to writing. It’s kind of like a biography of my whole life, just in one song. This whole EP and every single song makes sense to me, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.

You listen to ‘Porch Light’ and it’s quite obvious that it’s a song about a certain person who I knew wasn’t great for me, but who was comfort – and I kept going back. ‘Happy House’ – that’s definitely something that I had gone through as a little girl. But then you listen to ‘Heaven and Hell’ – I’ve never fallen in love with a Texas cowboy. I don’t know what that feels like, but I do know what it feels like to fall in love with someone who is not quite who I should be with. Same with ‘Lily of the Valley’.

Ultimately, I knew that bringing out Outrun as this conclusion of music for the year just felt right.

The song ‘Outrun’, it’s my personal favourite. It almost comes with a bit of a challenge or a threat attached to it?

That’s exactly what I want you to feel. I’m one of the softest, kindest [people], but as soon as I feel a certain way, I just I hold it with so much power. And I can either fight it, or I can write a song like ‘Outrun’.

So the EP is sonically different from the last one. Let’s talk about how you achieved that. Did you work with the same team, with different instrumentation, or different production, or a bit of all of the above?

It was definitely different instruments, and tapping into a deeper, moody, raw kind of feeling. I’ve been really lucky to have some of the boys in my band play on Outrun as well. And I think because we spend so much time together, and we know each other’s emotions, they’re able to really connect to the songs. And I understand where they need to be – I think that’s really important as well. It’s such an incredible thing to go through with band members. There’s just nothing quite like it.

You can feel that – when musicians work together who know each other, there’s something indefinable …

Yeah, it’s like chemistry, it really is. You’re totally locked in.

You wrote all the tracks yourself, except for one of the songs, which is ‘Lily of the Valley’. You wrote with Nashville-based singer/songwriters Brandon Hood and Billy Montana. How does your songwriting process change when working on a collaboration, as opposed to writing on your own?

I love writing by myself, and I’m quite protective of how I write, and my process and the places that I have to go to tap into certain feelings. But I think switching from writing by yourself to writing with other writers, you really need to be open. Sometimes that can be really hard. But with Brandon and Billy, we were on the same page. I’m a huge fan of Brandon Hood and what he’s produced so far. Not to mention Billy Montana, who is one of the greatest of all time.

I said to them that I’d really like to write a song that’s a bit mysterious and unruly, and a storyline that takes people on this crazy journey. And it was actually Billy who said, “I’ve got this song title, ‘Lily of the Valley’.” And we were just bouncing ideas: where is she? What’s she doing? Where does she live? What does it look like? And it came together. It was a crazy four hours of writing that song, because lyrically, it’s just such a huge song … like a movie, almost.

It feels like an old fable or something …

Yeah, we were just [working] on the same idea – she’s held in this cabin by, I guess, her dad, and she sneaks out and finds a guy, and she goes down to the river. Even just before writing with them, part of my honeymoon with my husband was driving through the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. It was like seeing America for what it may have been in the 1700s, like there’s nothing quite like it. And a native flower to that area of the Appalachian Mountains is a lily of the valley. So there are so many little details about it. I just love that song.

It’s been a massive year for you, Sara – apart from being incredibly prolific with all of your creating and releasing of music, you also got married and you have a baby on the way, this coming February. How do you do it all?

It’s really hard. I just look at other artists and I go, well, if they’re doing it, I can do this. But truly, I couldn’t be more content with how things have played out. When you’re in a job like this, timing is everything – it’s crucial. How everything has happened has been perfect timing, with shows and releasing music and having enough time when my baby is small to get in the groove of what being a mum could be like. And then hopefully working on an album for next year. I love that we’re making it work.

I don’t ever really get a feeling that I’d like to have time off. For artists, musicians, people who are creative, as soon as we stop, it’s not good – it’s not good for our creative space. I just want to keep momentum and keep going. I’ve got so much that I need to work on.

What’s coming up for you, tour-wise, with the new EP?

We’ll let the EP have its run for a little bit, and then I’m back for CMC Rocks. CMC was one of the first festivals that I got booked for, and I’m so lucky to be back. It’s now one of the biggest country music festivals here in Australia, and I’m back for the third time. That’s March, and progressively after that, we’re working on potentially some acoustic runs. An acoustic run of shows just seems right for Outrun as well. I’d love to go on a national tour again [next year], but already I’m feeling really lucky to have the festival shows.

I really feel like myself when I play the Outrun EP, so it’s a good feeling.

Sara Berki’s EP Outrun is out now via Warner Music. You can download and stream here.
Follow Sara Berki on her website, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.