INTERVIEW: Lenka on her eighth album 'Good Days': "I really wanted to find some human warmth, for better or worse, even if there's a few mistakes and little weird bits in there."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 3 June 2026

Australian singer-songwriter Lenka has been weaving her charming path through pop for 20 years. Originally a member of the band Decoder Ring, she released her debut single ‘The Show’ in 2008 and it became a major hit worldwide - 78 million streams to date on Spotify alone - and was performed at the Oscars by Billy Crystal. She has a truly eclectic portfolio of music, with songs spanning warm guitar driven indiepop, synthpop and cutting edge electronica

She has recently released her eighth studio album Good Days, which sees her returning more to the sound that marked her earliest solo releases: indiepop and soul mixed with more than a dash of jazzy showtunes. There is a simplicity, an earthiness to the album that has a reassuring familiarity along with an intriguing newness.

Produced by Tony Buchen (The Preatures, Courtney Barnett), the album’s ten tracks sees Lenka musing on being a mid-life woman in a perplexing world, with lyrical content confronting cancer, her husband’s devastating accident and the sometimes exhausting drive to put on a happy face despite the overwhelming problems of the world tormenting us underneath.

This dilemma is explored in the album’s first track, and single, ‘Sunshine Girl’. A perky, bright soundscape and Lenka’s almost child-like vocal represents the always smiling face, but the struggle behind it all is exposed in the occasional darker beat and Lenka’s lower vocal: “How can anyone stay sunny in such a dark world?” she sings.

‘Love Is A Beat’ is a 1960s-riffing pop song that explores how the arrival of Lenka’s partner saved her after a string of heartbreak: ‘And then there was you…You were there at the right time just when I needed you.”

‘They Never Said’, with its dramatic soulful opener also looks at romance, but from the angle of the pressure society puts on everyone to find the perfect relationship, and the subsequent shame if it doesn’t work out: “But they never said what to do if it shatters / They just said love is all that really matters.”

In the middle of the album, ‘Heart Flame’ is a sonic outlier and undoubtedly one of the highlights. A gorgeous dialled back, piano based ballad, Lenka sings of feeling depleted spiritually and how she pulls herself out of the hole she finds herself in. It swells with strings and drama as the song progresses, and is one of Lenka’s finest vocal performances.

With a largely stripped back feel, and a soundscape with trumpet, saxophone and trombone, ‘Mettle’ brings another completely different feel to the album, almost woozy, dreamlike. Written in response to a bike accident her husband had which left him with 7 metal plates in his face and wrist, it is a song of both physical and emotional pain, but also of survival and triumph: “You’re made of stronger stuff than before.”

It is followed, almost with a flourish, by ‘Archetypal’ which Lenka says “explores the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious and how we are channelling certain archetypes again and again.” It offsets the heavy lyric content with a delicious disco swirl and perhaps the most multi-layered - in the best way possible - soundscape on the album. 

The album closes with two tracks that delve into the juxtaposition of negative and positive, light and shade. ‘Silver Linings’ is a pensive song with a shuffling beat that lends a hint of trip-hop to the song. Written for a friend diagnosed with breast cancer, it encourages her to chase the silver lining through all the bad parts until they are conquered and she is left with just the silver lining - the good parts. ‘Carry on and on and on and on / ‘Till the silver lining’s all you’ve got.’

Album closer ‘The Balance’ includes a list of positive and negative words suggested to Lenka by her global fanbase. Delivered almost as a piece of beatnik poetry, the message the song projects is that “We all know there’s gotta be a balance in the universe,” and that the negatives need to be experienced to make the positives so much better.

Good Days is a triumph for Lenka, - a combination of emotive vocals, addictive melodies and strong, lyrical storytelling - and solidifies exactly why she is such a compelling artist. She is one of those unique artists where listening to her music is an intensely moving experience - you’re not quite sure why, but every step in the journey makes you really feel. Music you will return to over and over again. Jett Tattersall for Women In Pop recently chatted to Lenka to find out all about the creation of Good Days.

Hi Lenka, congratulations, and thank you for such beautiful music. You’ve always had this ability in all your music to get really big with your thoughts, but then smash them down into such beautiful, accessible avenues. There's something very beautiful about it, but at the same time, you never quite let the melancholy go. There's a really delicate dance that I think is so inherently human and feminine in your new music that I love, it encompasses so much. 
I’m so glad you see that in it. I do try to make things personal but universal, so that's probably where that scope comes in, where it sounds big yet small. The melancholy thing is trying to find joy but not be cheesy, it is definitely a delicate balance.

There is this flex we have in humanity where we feel that joy and rage and all these emotions are chasms apart, but actually they're so close to each and we can easily jump from one to the next. What you've been doing is bridging these emotions with this beautiful kind of whimsy. Has that always been a personal way you navigate your own life?
Good question. I think that I'm a fairly dramatic person. I do have a wide scope of those emotions, and the joy and the rage are certainly places that I go to a lot, pendulum swinging back and forth in a humanly healthy way. Nothing that's ruining my life, but I've always felt like I'm quite moody. We are taught to be embarrassed about certain emotional states, to be a bit cringe or a bit ashamed of too much of a peak of good or bad feelings, and we hide them a little bit.

Songwriting, for me, is a way of turning them into art and putting them in a piece of poetry gives them a place to be, rather than just unleashing them all over the place. For me, songwriting has been the most effective way to do that, it just feels really cathartic for me. The response that I've gotten over my 20 year career from listeners hearing my music is that it helps them navigate things that they're going through. It mostly cheers them up, mostly they say thank you so much for that song, it got me through a really tough time, Often it can be quite extreme, like that song got me down off the verge, that song got me through a really difficult breakup. I'm kind of hooked on that now, I feel like music is so medicinal, and when you're talking about emotions, it can help you compartmentalise, and it can help you have a place for those feelings. I guess that's why I do it, that's the precious thing that I feel like I've got to hold on to now.

I think that's absolutely lovely, and here's something in what you've just said that I feel can only come with either an old soul or with time.
I think it's probably time, because at the beginning I didn't know what that felt like, as far as the response from listeners, I was only writing things for myself. That is definitely me at midlife, having been on this journey as an artist for quite a long time, and having found a way to make bite-sized pieces of emotional therapy through music. This is album eight, so I've had a relationship with my listeners for quite a long time now, and even though I'm still quite selfishly doing it just for me when I'm writing, I do have half an eye on what they might be thinking about it when it gets released. Not ‘my fans won't like this, I'm not going to release it’, but how is this going to land, and is this going to make people feel good? Is it universal enough? As a music listener, it's really great when there's room for your life story. I think about the songs that I was loving when I was a teenager, like Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Bjork, and I was just devouring these women's outpouring of their souls, but I was implanting my own situations on it. I was lying there listening in my bedroom, feeling like it was life coaching for me, what they were going through. So I was really aware from a young age of the special symbiotic relationship between an artist and a listener. So I really cherish that.

You've been in this industry for quite some time now, do you feel we're now coming to a point where that appreciation of listening to women's voices is returning? There was a moment where the only songs that women could sing were written by middle-aged dudes.  
It's really hard to say, because you can't really experience what it's like to be from a different generation. I would say maybe they would argue with you and say no, there has been these troubadours of heartfelt songwriting that whole time, and we have been connecting with them that whole time, and you just don't know. A lot of people clearly relate to Taylor Swift and I think it is a similar relationship. I would say probably all those millennials and Gen Z-ers, would feel like that about her, that she has been sending them messages to do with their own lives that whole time, and that they would listen to every song in her catalogue.

As a music listener now, and this might be just because I'm getting older or impatient, and I feel really bad about it. I don't go and listen to people's whole albums as much as I used to. I have a lot of just one or two songs from an artist that I really like that I've put on a playlist. I've got some really great playlists that are downloaded onto my phone, I know that they're going to be there for me. Quite a lot of them are just one or two songs from certain artists that I don't really know their catalogue and I'm ashamed about that, to be honest, because if I'm expecting other people to listen to my catalogue, I should be exploring other artists as well! But sometimes a song can really strike you through the heart, but it's a next level obsession that you are going to go and listen to all their albums. I think it also has something to do with the streaming world that we live in now, there's just so much out there to digest.

I don't think you should feel bad about that at all, I think it's great that we can hear all these songs! Your albums have such a richness of sound, and I think, in particular with this one, there's depth in the room, like I can hear the floor if you know what I mean.
I'm so glad, that's down to the producer, Tony Buchan, and my direction, saying I really wanted it to sound quite realistically retro. I'd been listening to a lot of old soul, but also newer bands that are doing an old soul sound, and what is it that makes this sound like it's from the 60s? I was explaining that to Tony, and it's all about getting the right microphones and processes and amps, and then having it all set up in the room. We were doing quite a lot of recording at the same time, so we'd have the bass, the guitar, the drums in another room, the piano in another room, and me on a microphone. We wanted it to sound a bit like a house band, so the fact that you can kind of hear the room is so great. My dad's a jazz musician, so I grew up listening to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and stuff like that, really early 1940s recordings, where there was one microphone, and they would stick the trumpet and the drummer at the end of the room, and then they'd have the vocalist closest, and they'd just do the mix in the room, because that's all they could do. I've always loved that, so I really did try to create that sound.

Well, you accomplished it!
Great! It just sounds so warm, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this might be a little bit of a reaction against how much computers are in our life lately. I'm just getting so sick of it, I'm having a really visceral reaction against just not wanting anything digital. I need to not put in a password, not type anything, not have a constant screen in my face. That's why I'm putting this record out on vinyl, I've just really wanted to find some human warmth, for better or worse, even if there's a few mistakes and little weird bits in there. That's part of what makes something human, and I would rather take that right now than all the digital perfection that we're delivered constantly.

I think that's what people crave, and they have been craving a while, but that’s something again that only comes with time and experience to appreciate and there's got to be a balance. 
And there’s a song called ‘The Balance’ on my album!

 I wanted to talk to you about that one as, because that one came from conversations with your fans, am I right?
Yeah, so we were recording the album at the time, and I knew I needed a couple more tracks. I decided I wanted to do a quick conceptual collaboration song where I would do a song with words, write a song with words from my listeners around the world. So I did a shout out asking for words that spark joy for people and trigger a nice feeling. I got a lot of words back from all different countries around the world, and then a couple of days later, I asked for words that were the opposite, that sparked a negative feeling in them. I didn't get as many of those back, which was really interesting - goes to show that my fan base are like me, and they lean more towards the positivity than the negativity! Then I just listed the words. I used to do performance art, and I love this kind of beatnik poetry idea of just listing something. I did use AI for the first and only time to put them into rhyming couplets, which was okay, but it wasn't amazing, and I ended up ditching quite a lot of what the robots gave me. It's a kooky little track, but I love the way it turned out. 

The philosophy behind it is that everything has to be in balance, and we've got to have both, and these are your examples that you've given me of the light and the dark, and we're all humans, and so there's a lot of crossover, and these are just some of the things that people experience in their day, and we need it all. I see myself as God's secretary in this song. I'm just taking the notes and jotting it down and spitting it out, and that's just the way it has to be. We need it all, and that's what life is, that's what nature wants, that's what the universe wants. You can't have one without the other. 

One song that stuck out for me is ‘Mettle’. You looked at it and said this means strength and force, you’ve got to have the balls to survive it,  but it's also the old English way to spell metal. And you looked at it as how is this applied to something that was really shockingly terrifying for both myself and my partner. What does that do? How are we both forged in something that can be broken? You're getting these big things and playing with them, and almost saying to your listeners, it's okay to play with them, it's okay not to have the answers. Keep chasing the question.
Absolutely, and it's okay to turn something traumatic into an artwork. It's actually really cathartic. We don't have to run away from our bad feelings. It was great for me to write that song, and my husband, he's an illustrator and he made a zine out of the experience. Once he had psychologically come around to the fact that he could turn it into art, and it wasn't so life-threatening, he spat out that entire body of text and illustrated all around it and turned it into this freaky little zine and did a public talk on it. Once he could talk again, he stood up in front of an audience and spoke about it, and he's distributing them out to people, and it's just like, well, this is what we do, I guess. We're artists and this is how we process trauma. So I did my thing, he did his thing, and it helped us get over it.

 That's such a beautiful application -  when something horrific is happening, the first thing you think of is ‘would this be a good song?’
It's kind of what art is there for, that's why we do it, that's why we've done it since the dawn of time. A lot of the time that’s what painting is about, that's what cave paintings were about, that's what books are about. I really am a huge believer in the power of all the arts, and it's helping me, and then hopefully it helps other people too somehow.

I want to talk a little bit about ‘Sunshine Girl’, that song is about that societal push to keep a sunny disposition when it's not the case. You seem to be very understanding and across your emotions and understanding their purpose, but do you also ever feel trapped in your own optimism?
Yeah, I do. That song started with my feelings about having to always sugarcoat things for my kids, as a parent trying to find the balance between being a realist and letting them know that the world isn't all sunshine and lollipops, but not allowing them to be too freaked out. That's been quite difficult for me as a parent, because I'm very honest, so I have to constantly edit myself and make sure I don't tell them too much about what's going on in the world. That's how I came up with ‘I wish I could be a sunshine girl every day of the week. But I was thinking I've kind of set myself up to be this as an artist and as a public figure. My relationship with my fans, is that healthy for me, and is that really honest? I do try to squash down my more negative feelings quite a lot, because I do believe that optimism is powerful, and I'm sort of struggling with that. The song takes a bit of a journey through trying to be light, then going into the dark, and then it mentions toxic positivity at the end, because if you want sunshine all the time, it's going to get really unhinged. In the end, I have decided that it is better for me, even if I have to fake it till I make it, try to come back to the light and keep pushing out a positive message to my family, my friends, and the wider community and my listenership, because it's going to be more helpful to everybody else. 

That’s beautiful, and you're so right about the unhinged, it’s a fine line!
That's right. Sometimes you meet people, and you're like, this is not real. Surely you have a bad day sometimes. I don't want to feel insensitive to some of the terrible things that are going on in the world, you can't just walk around being completely happy right now, you just can't. There's too many painful things going on in the world, that would be kind of evil in a way. I am aware that there is a balance that has to be struck, and for me, my way of feeling okay about being happy and sunny is to just find small ways within, whether it's in my community, through a charity, just trying to help. I'm trying to tip the balance towards the light in small ways.

I love that. After your years making music that has resonated so deeply with an audience, and also chasing music that you want to make, what still feels magical? What is the thing about songwriting that you still chase and thrills you?
I think it's got something to do with the combination of notes and melody that creates an elevated sensation in you, which has been scientifically studied and has to do with our pleasure centre hormones, our dopamine, our endorphins get triggered by certain patterns within the musical state scale and rhythms. There's something evolutionary about putting that and singing together, and I just feel so high when I strike one of those combinations in a song and get that flush of feeling, and I get really excited. It's an obsession, I'm just so hooked on it, I won't ever stop trying to do that. As a listener as well, it's a wonderful feeling. And then it's completely unbeatable when you get to do it live, and if the audience is singing along to that combination of notes, it's the most euphoric feeling in the world. I'm addicted.

Good Days is out now via Skipalong Records. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Lenka on Instagram, Facebook and her website.
Lenka will perform at The Vanguard in Newtown on 25 June. For all ticketing information, head to lenkamusic.com