INTERVIEW: Foley release new EP 'Like An Actress': "We're really able to push each other a lot more now, we can fight for what we want out of the song"
Interview: Shalane Connors
Published: 25 February 2026
Aotearoa-New Zealand born, now Sydney based duo Foley, made up of Ash Wallace and Gabe Everett have slowly but surely become a powerful force on the pop scene since they first released music in 2017.
Today they release their new EP Like An Actress, the duo’s first body of work since their acclaimed second album That’s Life, Baby! was released last year. Working with collaborators including Josh Naley (Navvy, Paige) and acclaimed engineers Nathan Dantzler (Sabrina Carpenter, Niall Horan) and Pedro Calloni (Chappell Roan, Alex Warren), the EP was inspired by the everyday conversations Wallace and Everett have as part of their friendship - “love, loss, exploration, identity.”
Sonically, the duo wanted to replicate their live shows and did the bulk of their writing on acoustic instruments, which they felt brought more connection to the songs.
“We approached this EP with more organic instruments - so that the studio experience was more physical and band driven,” Foley say. “The live show is such a crucial part of the project, so we wanted to write the songs even more locked into the show, with live instruments and feel. A lot of them were written with live piano, acoustic guitar, and live drums which is a real change up for us. It really unlocked a new energy in the studio - and the songs have a joy in them that I think you can really hear. Because it was written way more organically than previous records, the themes and lyrics feel more joined into the sonics of each track, rather than being a layer of emotion over the top. Everything feels very cohesive, dreamy and fluid which is a fun change!”
Opening the EP, ‘Cinematic’ showcases how Foley have married their pop sensibilities with a more immediate, live sound. Sparkly synths and a chomping bassline are still prominent throughout the song, but it is not a song that is drowned in production and you can easily imagine the band are playing it live right now for your own private concert. About a love that feels too good to be real, the lyrics gave birth to the EP’s title: ‘Oh you got me feeling like an actress / Cause everything we do is cinematic…and there's nothing else better than you.”
New single ‘Going Easy’ brings more of a pop-rock sound to the collection and again explores love, but from the angle where it has become too all-consuming: ‘With the way it's going baby / We’re gonna tear apart in the wind.’
‘Breakfast for Dinner’ sees Foley dip into yet another diverse soundscape with a toe-tapping country sound, although blended with a pop foundation. It looks at a more sensual, explorative side of love: ‘I could be your reckless beginner / Stay under the covers baby with me’.
The EP closes with two singles Foley released at the end of last year. ‘Honey’, with its driving beat and its feel good melodies is as infectious as ever, while ‘Suckerpunch’ has a dreamy synth pop sound that is both cinematic and melancholy as Wallace sings of relationships that never last: ‘Baby I can't believe you're the one who would leave / Guess it's character building for me.’ Ultimately though, she knows it is temporary and love is just around the corner: ‘it’s ok you can leave / I’ll go out and say all of the same things to someone who’ll adore me.’
Foley have always been a band full of charm, irresistible pop melodies and all round good feels. Like An Actress, with its subtle twist in their sound, shows off their true musicality and versatility, and is another high point in their impressive catalogue. Shalane Connors recently sat down with lead singer Ash Wallace to chat all about the creation of this gem.
Hi Ash! Congratulations on the release of your new EP Like An Actress! You've taken a more organic, band driven approach with this EP, opting for live piano, acoustic guitar and live drums. Was this an active desire to go in a new direction, or was this something that the songs themselves were asking from you?
It was a bit of a combination. We definitely had a lot of intention around using live drums and live acoustic guitar. I started out playing acoustic guitar, and I went away from it for a while, and then coming back to it on our last record where we kind of dabbled with it a bit. With this one we really, really wanted to just come back to that organic feeling, so that was definitely intentional. We write differently when we use acoustic instruments than we do when it's more synthesised, there's something really fun about being in the room and physically hammering something out.
It took us in a new direction, and then the songs really told us where to go. That's when the piano and some of those other acoustic parts came into it. The live drums was more of a choice around our live shows. We have a live drummer that we've used since the very start, Elijah, who's very much part of the family, and his contribution to the live show has just become such a cornerstone of the project. There's just such a magic when he plays drums, so we wanted to bring a bit of that energy to the recordings. We also use the fabulous drummer, Ben from the States, who did an amazing job as well. Just having that energy, it felt like it tied it in more to the way that we perform live.
You've had a super prolific release cycle. You've released a couple singles, a couple EPs and a couple of albums in the last two years. Talk me through the decision to go back to the smaller EP format for this one.
Yeah, it’s been a lot! It's interesting, sometimes you just feel an album coming. We always write a lot of music. we're very, very active as writers. We write lots of songs, and trying to whittle them down is usually the hardest part! For this one, we just moved to Australia, we're in a new place, a slightly new direction, new feeling in the room and we just immediately felt like testing a few things out and wrapping that up in an EP. It just felt right, and I'm not really sure why. It just felt like the right kind of realisation of where we're at now.
We'll probably do another EP after this, that hopefully will be the same, maybe like a partner to the current EP. I think sometimes an album is such a big undertaking, and you have to really be ready and have a super strong vision for what you want out of that album. Doing that twice in a row, we felt like an EP was probably the right next step. That makes us sound incredibly lazy, like we couldn't get an album out! But it was just the right size.
You mentioned your recent move to Sydney from New Zealand. Talk me through that decision. Was that a career based thing, and have you been finding the industry here compared to that back home, and also the time you have spent in the US?
It's amazing here. I really love it here. I'm a very proud Kiwi and I love Aotearoa, but I think if you are ambitious, not just in your career but generally in life, you have to go and experience other things. Our time in the US has been a massive part of that, South Korea has been a big part of that. We've always travelled a lot with the music and tried to soak up creative influence and energy and zest from other places.
We came to Australia for South by Southwest and Bigsound, and I just fell in love with the sunshine in Sydney, the energy here, the community has been so welcoming - I cannot say enough how wonderful and inviting everybody has been. The minute that I was here, I just had that feeling that there's something here for me that is going to be great for our career, somewhere bigger and better. In terms of the industry, there's a lot more pop music here, there's a lot more shows here, there's definitely more opportunity.
Also personally, it's just made me really happy being here, and I think that really feeds into your creativity. It being sunny, I cannot explain how much more energy that's given me, and I think that's been really good creatively as well.
What challenges if any, have you've faced with the move?
Like anything it's good and bad. I've definitely felt quite uprooted, we had such a strong community in New Zealand, and still do. When you live somewhere for a long time, you form so many connections that have so much history. I found in the New Zealand industry a lot more giving and receiving of favours, there's people there that I really trust and would do anything for, and hopefully vice versa. Going away from that, as much as everybody here has been so welcoming, it takes time to feel fully entrenched somewhere and to have the opportunity to give and be part of the scene for other people, and also have people be part of what you're doing. It just takes time to build that. I do miss that feeling, I found that a bit hard. Also being a Kiwi, you're not really a local Australian artist, but you're also not international enough to be sexy. We're kind of falling somewhere in the middle where I think Australians are like, ‘Oh yeah, our little brother and sister from New Zealand!’ But it's been mostly positive, and the challenges so far have just been challenges that we try and take in our stride
Being in a musical duo is such an interesting and intimate dynamic. You and Gabe are longtime best friends and collaborators. Talk me through your songwriting process together and how that's changed over time.
It's changed so much. The nucleus of our relationship was always our friendship, we were best friends for a long time before we even started Foley. We're really lucky that it started from a place of trust with intimacy there already, we’ve already chatted about our lives and everything that's going on.
Once we're in the writing room, the songs we're born really easily, because we already knew he's going to want to write about that breakup, or I'm going to want to write about this or whatever. We were probably more tentative at first in terms of how the other person likes to work, but I think we've just gotten better and better at always coming into the process with respect and love. We're really able to push each other a lot more now, we can fight for what we want out of the song. We can disagree a lot more heartily, we can have those creative disagreements in a much bigger way now, because there's just so much trust and love and respect that it could never go badly. I think the music is better for it now, we really experiment a lot more and we tell stories on a more intimate level. We just go to deeper places than we did at the start, because we've found that relationship over time, the creative relationship as well as the friendship.
The process in terms of songwriting is really different every time we start something. We love to collaborate, we're always writing with other people, other producers and writers and artists. That's so fun to me, to have this variable that changes every time. Gabe and I know that our relationship will be the same, but the other people in the room, their skill sets, what instruments they play, what they've been listening to, it’s always changing, so the process is just totally different every time, which is so much fun.
Are you like the married couple in the room who's got their shorthand, a different language?
100%. We always get told that we're like a married couple! A lot of people, once they spend time with us, think that we're siblings, because I think we just vibe that way. I'm very grateful for Gabe, because especially being a woman in the industry, I don't think I would have survived this long without him. He's always got my back, and he's always a protector of mine in the songwriting space and the industry everywhere. He's always at my side, so I'm really grateful for that relationship on all levels.
In terms of being a front woman working alongside a man, how do you perceive you're treated differently to Gabe, because you’re a woman?
The further I get into this, the more that I'm able to assert myself in a certain way. I've had to learn over time how to establish who I am within the band, what things someone should be coming to me on, and what things they should be coming to Gabe on. But at the start of the project, I definitely felt that discrepancy a lot more. I felt very let down or disappointed if somebody approached Gabe assuming that he would know more about something because he was a man, or treat him as the life force behind the project. There was so much of that at the start, I was always automatically perceived as just the singer, which I always felt was quite gendered. yeah.
Gabe has gotten more and more attuned to protecting me from that and helping to get me what I need out of those situations, helping to shine a light on what I am contributing. He's become more and more attuned and I've learned how to cope with, what do I need to fight and what is not the hill I'm going to die on? When is it important for me to be part of the conversation, and when is it not? I've always really tried to stand up for women in the industry and there's been a lot of opportunities that we have not taken due to there not being enough women involved, or we’ve spoken out about certain festivals, or radio in New Zealand and things like that. I've always tried to be as vocal as I can be in those spaces.
Where did the love of synth pop music come from? Who were your earliest female idols, and when did it turn to 80s synth pop?
My early idols were definitely Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac, I just completely fell in love with the songwriting. That was really the spark that started the fire for me, I just completely fell in love with her and just thought she was unbelievable, still do. The 80s energy really started to come through for me once I met Gabe, because he is such a Prince fan. I hadn't actually listened to much Prince prior to that, I'd been very much in the singer songwriter space. I loved Brooke Fraser, she's a Kiwi guitarist, singer songwriter and when I met Gabe, he just bought this funk and 80s awareness that I hadn't had, and I completely fell in love with it.
It really was us combining, we've retained a lot of pop-singer-songwriter sensibilities and in the vocal parts, but what surrounds it is very informed by Gabe’s early references but also so many contemporary artists that play with really fun sounds. Remi Wolf became a really big reference for us, her earlier albums had a massive interplay between really fun synth sounds, and organic instruments and electric guitar.
It probably makes for a much more fun touring experience than being just a singer songwriter!
Absolutely!
It's been a massive few years for you both with multiple album, single, EP releases, sold out international tours. What have been some of your favourite pinch me moments?
Oh, gosh, there's so many cool moments. We just got back from our South Korea tour, and that was definitely pretty pinch me in terms of it was the first time we'd played to an audience that don't speak English. We've toured the US and Australia and New Zealand, but being in Asia felt like a new level of our music reaching a place that we'd never been and had no particular connection to so being there. There was few fans who had bought vinyl in 2019 and one of our original Foley t-shirts, I want to say the first t-shirt we ever made. I'm always really grateful that serendipity or something has taken the music to South Korea. Who really knows why, but just seeing people in the flesh at the shows, and realising there's real people there that have loved the project since those early days, that was definitely a real pinch me, grateful moment for me.
That's amazing, the power of music. As an artist, how does it feel when you are performing to a crowd where English is not necessarily their first language?
It's a completely different experience, even between the songs, trying to communicate was a really different experience. We chat pretty freely on stage, we're always chatting to each other and making jokes and playing around. In the first show, we didn't really change anything about the way we performed, and we realised people could not follow what we were saying, there was no reaction from the crowd when we were speaking. So we learned lots of Korean phrases, and tried to find new ways to communicate. Which was so fun, because then if we said anything in Korean, even really badly - I’m sure my pronunciation was awful - they were just so stoked that we made the effort. So even that was really cool. It's amazing how music transcends language, Bad Bunny is a prime example, you know, with the halftime show being all in Spanish, and everybody just loved it. I don't speak any Spanish, and I still was completely transfixed.
On the new EP Like An Actress, what's your favourite song on it?
Ooh, choose my favourite child? I think ‘Cinematic’. It is genuinely the true story of how I met my fiancé. We don't usually write songs that are super literal, it's all based on our lives and what we're experiencing, but we're not usually so specific. Telling that story really specifically as to the night that we met and how I felt, and that feeling of holy crap, is this actually the person that I'm going to end up with, having that captured and distilled and bottled, is really cool. We made the music video in a stadium here in Sydney, and it just brought back all these memories, because the first line is ‘last night we broke into the stadium’, which we did do on the night that we met. So I’ve brought back all these memories of when I met him six or seven years ago, and it's really cool. So that one is very close to my heart.
I love it, it’s a gorgeous song. And what's next for you guys?
We've got a bunch of tour plans within the works that we're hoping to announce really soon, also going on tour in Sydney and Melbourne with fellow Kiwi Muroki, which will be really cool. And just new music all the time. We never stop. For our last album we did a songcamp getaway, we went away for a few days and wrote lots of it on Waiheke Island in New Zealand, we've set up a studio out there. So we're doing that again in a few weeks to see if we can capture that magic again and write some more music that we love. So lots of shows and lots of new music. It's just keeps on coming!
Like An Actress is out now. You can download and stream here.
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