INTERVIEW: Danielle Spencer on her first album in 16 years 'Regenerate': "Don't be just the person in the background helping everybody else. You're allowed to step up and grab something for yourself."

Interview: Shalane Connors
Image: Joe Machart
Published: 27 March 2026

Sixteen years after her last album, Regenerate is perhaps a fitting title for singer-songwriter-actor Danielle Spencer’s third studio album, out today. Yes, it is the beginning of a new era for one of Australia’s most well known creatives, but after so long away it is still abundantly clear that Spencer is the same incredible artist she was on her first release back in 2001. There is a uniqueness, a beauty, a sense of otherworldliness to her music that still ensures she stands out from the crowd in the best way possible.

Written entirely by Spencer, Regenerate explores themes of rebirth, self-discovery and personal growth, with a focus on embracing everything you are, including your age, and never limiting yourself. The album was also inspired by the concept of movement and being present - Spencer was determined it would no longer be about singing while sitting behind a piano, there would be theatre and dance and excitement.

This ethos comes through in the soundscape, and while there are moments of gentle, quieter ballads, the album sees Spencer embrace electronic pop with many of the songs having a broader pop sensibility then her previous works, although still standing completely unique and outside the mainstream pop sound.

This is most evident on the album’s first single and title track ‘Regenerate’, a brooding, pulsing slice of electronica with soaring vocals and a recurring countdown which is almost hypnotic. With an ever changing rhythm, Spencer sings of breaking out of old patterns and starting again. ‘I’ve been gathering dust and cobwebs…it’s time to change / Time to grow', with the standout mantra ‘I can be anybody / You can be anybody / We can be anybody’.

The theme of embracing the here and now is continued on ‘Regenerate’s sister song ‘Older (Regenerate Part II)’. With a similar driving electronic beat, and a repeated vocal hook (‘Can I clap?’), the song celebrates being present in the age you are right now and owning everything that has led you to where you are now. ‘Sometimes we hold onto a life that leads us way past nowhere…Stronger, bolder, happy to be older.'

‘Parallel World’ is left-field pop track that can equally be the acceptance and celebration of who you are or the security of a relationship: ‘Welcome home / You’re not alone / Anything can happen here’, while ‘Once Upon a Time’ is a delightful, upbeat synthpop song that takes sidesteps into a more experimental sounds.

‘The Fitting Room’ continues Spencer’s foray into more electronic-synth sounds, with an eerie whispered opener of ‘do you need a friend?’as she sings of the monsters that can reside in our minds, often derailing s completely. ‘I’ll always be here just outside of time / Waiting in the wings of your mind’

Outside of the electronic tracks, there are moments of real beauty in Spencer’s ballads. The country tinged, piano driven ‘Hummingbird’, which at times has gorgeous lullaby moments, is an exploration of the frustration and hopelessness we can feel at life not going the way we want it to - ‘I’m living this all out of order / I think I wandered off the map’ - before realising everything is exactly where it is meant to be: ‘Right here, right now / I am a small part of a perfect plan.

The sweet, pop ballad ‘The Game’ sees one of Spencer’s greatest vocal performance on the album as she sings of feeling beaten down by a previous relationship, only to re-emerge as a better person. ‘I need you gone / Fade away / Take all those years / You can’t have another day…you almost had it won / But I’m back in the game.’ It is a beautiful listen, and like everything on the album, highlights Spencer’s remarkable lyricism. If this album reconfirms her musical genius, it should also also solidify her as an exceptional storyteller.

The album ends on part three of the ‘Regenerate’ trilogy with ‘ The Rest Of Your Life (Regenerate Part III)’. With a more upbeat feel than the previous two songs, it has twinkling synths and a message from yourself, to yourself, to embrace everything in your life. ‘You can always depend on me to be here to make you complete…let’s give this a try.’

Regenerate is a remarkable album that is more than just a collection of music. It is a journey, a sermon, a celebration of resilience and an anthem of self-love and empowerment. Sixteen years after her last album, Spencer has arguably hit a creative high with Regenerate and it is undoubtedly one of 2026’s greatest music moments. We recently sat down with Spencer to chat all about the creation of the album.

Congratulations on the release of your third album, Regenerate. It's been 16 years in the making, and marks a brand new chapter in your evolution, both artistically and as a woman. First of all, how does it feel to be getting back into the studio after this all this time? Is it like riding a bike, or does it take some adjusting?
It kind of took me a while to get into the swing of thinking that I was doing a whole album. I started off writing a bit, and thought I'll write a few songs and see how I go. I then got the feel for it and thought I've got the energy and enough to say that I want to do a whole album in the old fashioned sense where it all hangs together, it's a piece, as opposed to separate, unrelated tracks, which is how a lot of people do things now.

Getting back into the studio has been really enjoyable, actually, I really had fun with it, and took the pressure off myself. When I was younger and I had a record company over my shoulder, there's a lot more pressure and there's more people that you have to please and consult with, and this time I just felt completely in control of it. I co-produced it with a guy called Peter Holz, and we just beavered away and it was just very rewarding, not a stressful process at all. Creatively, it was probably the nicest time I've had because I didn't have any other outside pressures on me.

Is part of that having your boys all grown up now?
Yes, that helps, because you don't feel quite as guilty. When I was younger, I always felt guilty if I was concentrating on my own thing. Writing music and then recording it and performing it is incredibly time consuming, and you have to go into hyper focus to get it done. Obviously it takes a hell of a lot of time away from your kids, and I just didn't feel right doing it. Because their father was away working a lot, I thought they have to have one parent who's around, we can't both be gallivanting! So this time I didn't have that sense of guilt. There's still a lot of things in your life that you're trying to keep up with while you're doing it, my parents are getting older and I'm helping them with things so life remains complicated, but I didn't have the guilt with the kids, so that was good.

It’s been 16 years since your last album, have you been writing music this entire time, or is that something that has just come back now you have been afforded the time again to do so?
No, I hadn't been writing. I'd always play piano and write some melodies or whatever, but I hadn't been seriously writing and completing songs. It was during covid, when we were all locked away, where I reconnected with writing again and then got momentum after that, once we all got out of prison. It was that enforced, being locked away that I returned to feeling creative for the first time in a while.

This album is an exploration of being a woman who's more of a vintage, I don't like the word older! Obviously, is the title of one of your songs, and we are all getting older every single day, but it has always come with this other implication of being of the past. And I'm loving reclaiming older as something different to that. It's not of the past, we're just of a vintage.
Yeah, it's reclaiming it in a positive way. There's a lot of positive things that come with it, obviously there are negative things that come with it as well, we all know that. So it's reframing it to look at it as this is a different chapter, and there are these other factors in this chapter that are great. You don't have to wind down like a toy because you've hit a certain point in your life, you can actually look at it as this is a fresh start. Do it with positivity and with a positive attitude.

With the song ‘Older’, I would have related to that back at the end of my 20s too, because I kind of felt like turning 30 feels like the end of being really young. You have to be an adult now. I remember that transition being a bit confronting. There are all sorts of ‘older’, coming out of being a teenager into your 20s, so it doesn't have to apply to just the vintage ladies or gents, it applies to anybody who's facing a new phase or moving out of one phase into another. It can be confronting at any age.

It's a celebration of meaningful growth and wisdom and years of experience. I want to touch on how vulnerable it is putting yourself back in the limelight in an industry that has typically been so youth focused in the past. Are you feeling that, or are you feeling very powerful and that times are ready to fucking change?
I don't care, I'm not self conscious about it. I've written an album that is very authentically me, and let's put it this way, if I was with a label and they were making me sing bubbly pop songs that really suit a 22 year old, then I would feel uncomfortable about it. If they were trying to make me dress up like a hot, young, sexy thing, I definitely would think this feels a bit uncomfortable, and I probably shouldn't be doing it. But because I've written an album that says a whole bunch of things that I want to say as a female and just as a human and also as a person getting older, I'm not uncomfortable with it because it's a good fit because it's all my kind of emotion and ideas in it.

The world is improving a bit in this way, but not so much in the music business, there's still a hell of a long way to go. Radio, for instance, does not support older artists, and by older, I mean pretty much anybody over 30 at this point. Certainly in Australia, the industry doesn't support Australian female artists. They're not very good at supporting any Australian artists, but particularly female artists over a certain age. There's a lot of really successful female artists who you would assume are on radio, and they're not. So on that note, I've got involved in this new music platform called Glow, and that is about platforming Australian and New Zealand female artists who deserve to be out there and seen and have their work listened to, because nobody's actually supporting it in the industry. It’s a 24 hour radio station that is all Australian, New Zealand, female singer songwriters. It's a podcast where one artist is interviewing another artist, and it's going to be an album once a year where everybody puts one song on it. There will also be a tour where different female artists get together and do shows. So we're trying to do something about it in our little way.

I love your approach to this album and in the aesthetic side of it as well. You've approached it with such bold glamour. It’s like ‘Look at me, I'm still here bitches!’ Tell me about that aesthetic choice.
I wanted to make it a bit theatrical and basically just have fun with it. I thought if I'm doing it again, I may as well push it and have some fun. For my last two albums, I was always sitting behind a keyboard playing. All the live gigs were sitting behind a keyboard, and I kind of got bored of that. I wanted to be up doing some movement and make things a bit more dramatic and theatrical. As I said, record companies like to portray the ladies in a sexy way so I wanted to go opposite to that and make it just theatrical and a bit more interesting

Who were your influences as a youngster, who really paved the way for your music?
In terms of my aesthetic and writing, when I first started writing, I was inspired by movie soundtracks. I liked that cinematic thing, and I particularly liked creepy, eerie soundtracks. I remember being a bit obsessed with the soundtrack to The Exorcist and The Omen, they both had creepy, interesting music that I found captivating at that point, and that's when I started writing piano melodies and things

That's probably the last thing I expected to hear as the answer to that question, but now that you've said it, I can see some of that in the way ‘Older’ starts, that's quite creepy.
Yeah, definitely. I can remember the connection of me sitting at the piano and starting to write, and that was the influence. It was creepy soundtracks. I just have always liked eerie sounding music for some reason.

It's so cool to have that through line as well, and you're very much authentically holding on to something that got your feels from the start. What impact do you hope this album has on women who might be feeling vulnerable about ageing, or feeling like they're ageing out of their industry?
I would like to reframe this stage of life, or any stage of life where you might be thinking, I'm moving out of one phase into another, which means things are shutting down, and it's all negative from here. We are kind of almost brainwashed into feeling like getting older is a negative, the older you get, the worse it is. So I'm trying to reframe that and also promote that idea that you can actually pull yourself out of those little pits that you fall into sometimes, when you feel like you don't know what to do next, or you've run out of batteries. We all have those times, I was in that phase before I started writing the album, I had kind of slumped into a bit of a coma and wasn't feeling particularly inspired or motivated. It's important when you're in that state to really look for the things that will re-energise you or stimulate you, and to actually give yourself a kick in the backside to wake up.

A lot of the time for women, particularly as you're getting older, you get sidelined. You're looking after the kids, you're looking after your parents as they're getting older, and you're sidelined, so you slip into the background in your own life. The track ‘Regenerate’ is about this is my show, be the central character in your own life. It doesn't mean you're being selfish about it, but actually be the central character. Don't be just the person in the background helping everybody else. You're allowed to step up and grab something for yourself.

You have been stepping up and grabbing it the last year and a half or so, you really are reclaiming your space. It's amazing to see. What is next for you after you release the album?
I would love to do some shows, so that will be what we're working on next. And as I mentioned before, the Glow project is something I'm passionate about, so I'll be working on that and trying to bring some female artists together to do some shows about the place. I think that would be really satisfying to actually get three or four Australian singer songwriters on the same bill and do a little tour, and just have that sense of support and camaraderie from other women who are out there still doing it.

Regenerate is out now. You can buy and stream here.
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