INTERVIEW: Tori Forsyth on the release of her fourth album 'Self Preservation': "I always feel at odds with myself about how I can't perfectly be put into any category...It's just innately who I am."
Interview: Shalane Connors
Image: Jazmyn Arté
Published: 9 October 2026
The word ‘preservation’ often conjures up the act of lovingly maintaining something so it remains in a state of perfection for all to cherish for as long as possible. But for Australian alt-country-rock artist Tori Forsyth, preservation is more synonymous with decay.
The genesis of her fourth album, Self Preservation is rooted in that same decay. A serious car accident, the death of her dog, the near death of her father and the end of her long term relationship led Forsyth to consider giving up on the album completely. Instead, it became a cathartic, rehabilitating journey back to some semblance of normality. “Making this record reminded me there is beauty in being human, beauty in the mess, the contradictions and everything else in between,” Forsyth says. “Once again, music has saved my life.”
Written entirely by Forsyth and produced by her long time producer Scott Horscroft, the album was recorded in just two weeks. In her decade long career, Forsyth has become one of Australia’s most unique and fascinating musicians, with her output including bluegrass, country, rock, indie with hints of almost every single genre in between. Self Preservation is almost a representation of her career to date, with a varied soundscape with the gentlest of country songs sitting comfortably alongside harder rock tracks. The change in sound never detracts from the album though, with it remaining a unified, coherent piece of art.
The first track on the album, ‘I’m Not God’, “sets the tone for the whole album,” Forsyth says. A gorgeous, pared back ballad with an emotive vocal from Forsyth it is a song of backing yourself and staying true to who you are. ‘When it all comes around / You’re sticking to your truth / It’s the sweetest damn sound.’ ‘Notice The Roses’ is a pure bluegrass track and is a clear reflection of the difficulties she experienced leading up to the album, and the need to slow down and appreciate life ‘I think it’s time I need to slow it down / My ambition breaks the ceiling…but now I need my feet back on the ground.’
Alongside the quieter, more reflective moments, Self Preservation also sees Forsyth in a darker, louder, more aggrieved mood. Two tracks in particular rail at society and they way women are treated in a gloriously loud, anarchic soundscape that takes no prisoners. ‘Little Girls with Guns’ has a moody, shimmering rock sound where Forsyth takes clear aim at the hate that is routinely dished out to women. ‘Sound the alarm, it’s survival / A silly little girl with a rifle / He looked me in the eyes, how delightful / But bring a missile to a shootout, I’m spiteful.’
The deliciously titled ‘Today I Woke Up And Chose Violence’ blends hard rock with country with Forsyth giving a simple answer to why she chose violence and rage over the alternative: ‘Better than sitting in silence / It's better than feeling the feet of all these fools walking all over me.’
‘Satan In A Sunday Hat’ is another rock track that explores the complexities of human nature - Forsyth opens the song with the lyric ‘I’m a walking contradiction just looking for fun’. It was also inspired by how quickly the requirements for an ‘acceptable' public image we are all increasingly forced into change, thanks to social media. ‘By the time you catch up, that version’s already dead’ she sings.
Forsyth has said Self Preservation is her best collection of music to date, and it is hard to argue with that statement. It is an album with layers, honest storytelling, almost visceral emotions and a fluidity to the soundscape that continuously engages. The album was born from traumatic experiences, but amongst the pain there is beauty, hope and new beginnings, and Forsyth says, universal experiences within her words. “Creating worlds and stories is something I have always loved to do,” she says. “I hope people listening can hear themselves somewhere within it.”
We recently sat down with Forsyth to chat all about the creation of the album.
Hi Tori! Congratulations on the release of Self Preservation. It is a brilliant album. It's so multifaceted and is quite different from your last album All We Have Is Who We Are from 2024. Talk to me a little bit about what's happened in that time for you and the genesis of Self Preservation.
Thank you so much for your compliments. I appreciate it. Sonically it is definitely different to All We Have Is Who We Are., but in the context of my overall releases, I feel like it gives people the overall context of who I am as an artist. I've released a rock record, I've released a very bluegrass EP, and I've released a couple of very country records, so I feel like this is the perfect example of everything in one. It covers all of the sounds that I love. I love rock because I love performing rock, and I love writing songs because I love country music. And I feel like this encompasses all of that in one go.
The incredible single ‘Today I Woke Up and Chose Violence’, along with the album art both sit in a very aggressive space, and the album art is quite disturbing in some ways. What's been the feedback to you being a woman and owning this space that women don't usually get the chance to sit in?
It’s funny, with the album art, the first thing people say is that they think it's scary. I don't know why that didn't occur to me whatsoever whilst doing it! To me, the the idea of it is to represent self preservation in its purest form. When we're thinking about preserving ourselves, that comes with a a degree of decay. So the half melting face to me is a representation of that, and I really wanted to go all in with something like that. I love art and I wanted to put something beautiful together that was also a little bit confronting because to me the whole process of recording, writing and putting this record out has been quite confronting.
‘Today I Woke Up And Chose Violence’ is just about as women, it's really difficult to advocate for yourself. We're really programmed to want to be people pleasers and not rock the boat. For me, I've wanted to get across that anger isn't necessarily a bad feeling to have as much as we're being programmed to believe it is. It's okay to feel that way. I'm by no stretch of the imagination trying to instigate unsolicited violence, it's more about the idea that when women do speak up for themselves. it's like, ‘oh, what are they doing?’ It feels like the reception of it is like they've instigated some sort of violent act when it's really just bare minimal respect.
What I find so beautiful about this album is it is an ode to strong womanhood, there's this feminine rage and retaliation in there. ‘Satan in a Sunday Hat’ is one of my favourites, and then the follow up to ‘Nothing Wrong With Me’. There's a lyric in that that really spoke to me, and I feel it’s the theme of this album: ‘I feel a bit dishevelled when perfection is the key / But if I can blame the devil, then there's nothing wrong with me’. As a woman in the industry, have you had to deal with that pressure of perfectionism in putting your brand out there, putting your self image out there?
It's not been easy for me, particularly with social media and just how quickly things change with social media. I wish I was more inclined to want to “move with the times”, but there's something in me that really does rebel against how rapid things move, as far as what is expected of us as personal brands online, and what that looks like, and the output in which we need to commit to to to keep up with everything. It all is very steeped in what you look like and the image that will be present, particularly online. I definitely have struggled with it.
With ‘Satan in a Sunday Hat’, I didn't even think that would really become a song. It was me poking fun at myself and the complexities of being a human being and how nothing quite fits. I always feel at odds with myself about how I can't perfectly be put into any category, and it's not me necessarily trying to make things harder for myself. It's just innately who I am. It's very hard for me to brand, I guess. So when I'm talking about being a contradiction, it's not necessarily that I've always enjoyed being that but I'm trying a little bit more to be okay with myself in that way.
With ‘Nothing Wrong With Me’ it's really a reflection of being human and being expected to upkeep this level of a character that we put online. If you've got an Instagram account, you've essentially got yourself a brand, and we're moving in a way where everyone's got their own personal brand, and I think that's a really interesting concept. ‘Nothing Wrong With Me’ is really just about this upkeep of perception. No matter who we are, we've got this weird kind of responsibility, or maybe we feel under pressure to upkeep at a level of perception that isn't necessarily human. For me it was like, well, if I can blame something else for my imperfections and my shortfalls, then there's nothing wrong with me, and I guess that was my way of trying to rationalise that in my own head.
I want to talk a little bit about the production of Self Preservation and how you recorded it. You've worked with Scott Horscroft a lot in the past, but this album's is another step up, the production is absolutely gorgeous. How did you record it? Did you record it with your band that you usually tour with?
Thank you. We did, we recorded it as a band, and it was so much fun. We did it in about two weeks and it was us all just giving everything that we had to the songs. The funnest thing recording as a band is having each person put their own flair on the songs and bring what they envision with it and see what we come up with, which is why sonically it's so diverse. I've been playing with these guys for a long time now, and I feel like we've cultivated a sound together within the Tori Forsyth record universe, whatever you want to call it. I went into the studio right off the back of a US tour, so we were really on a roll with each other, and it came together so perfectly. I'm just really proud of it.
And now you're gonna have the really awesome process of reverse engineering it to figure out how to do it live, so that it sounds like the recording. Is that something that you have to keep in mind when you're producing?
Not when we're recording, we just do everything we can to serve the songs when we're doing the recording process. As far as creating a live show, we've spent a lot of time this year trying to create something that's just that next level and a bit more fleshed out. The next time we're touring, we're gonna have a six-piece band, and we're creating a show that will translate the record 100%. We spent quite a bit of time trying to create that, and we're really excited to be able to put it forward because we're getting closer to having something really cool. It's been fun to try to get the record perfect in a live setting. Historically, when we play, the audience would probably see the songs a little differently. We tend to be a bit rockier when we playing as a band, and things get a little faster. But we're trying to stay true to the record for this next touring and just give people a really good understanding of all of these tracks.
Awesome. Talk to me about touring in the USA. How does it differ to the musical landscape in Australia?
It's definitely very different. For myself, being in country music, I've always had a sound that was sitting outside of country in Australia. Going over there, I am an ant in in the context of being different. I'm not different over there. It's very common for bands and artists to get creative with their sound and within country music in itself, and it's not bizarre to have rock-heavy sets and still play country music. I really loved that. It was this immediate acceptance of what we were doing.
Rob Hillier is someone who just really believed in what we were doing, and he wanted to take us to the states to play a few festivals. He showed us this part of the world that just loves what we were doing, and we later realised that America is very receptive to a conglomerate of sound and different ways of putting shows together. Whereas in Australia, it's more of they don't know what they don't know, as far as country goes. At the moment, what's popular here is very much the pop country. It's very pop country heavy, which is fine, each to their own, but it does put us slightly on the outside, and that's all fine. We still have people here that absolutely love what we do, but it's definitely more normalised over there.
Before talking to you today, I went and listened to Black Bird, which was your first EP you put out in 2015, and over that time, so much has changed for you production wise. You can really see so much growth there. But what really stood out to me was that your songwriting has always been so strong. Your ability to craft lyrics and the overall arc of a song, is that a skill that you've always had since you were little? How did you discover this ability to to write songs?
I feel like I've always had this, and I've always had a really crazy imagination. As a kid, I was really encouraged to have an imagination, and I think that's why I can I found it really easy. In school, I was absolutely terrible at maths and science and anything to do with numbers, but I did tend to find English and anything creative very easy. I didn't know I was good at it, I just I enjoyed it, and I seemed to pass. I was by no means a great student, but English and music were the two subjects that I managed to scrape by in. I've always found reading and words to be one of my favourite things, and it's so interesting to me to construct songs. It's funny listening back to Black Bird, sometimes we'll have to do it just to refresh our memories when we're doing shows, it's cute. My voice has definitely changed in 10 years, my voice has deepened for sure. I sound like a cute little chipmunk!. It all does come down to having an imagination and creating worlds and stories, and it's something that I just have always really loved to do.
Who were your idols when you first set out in on your career?
I grew up in a house that played a lot of Fleetwood Mac, so Stevie Nicks was definitely one of them, and my mum played a lot of Melanie Safka. Between the two of those women, they're my main influences. A lot of music was played in my house. Music was inherently very much a part of both my parents' lives. My dad was actually a bodyguard before I was born, so he would bodyguard for artists and stuff like that, so he was kind of in the industry and always listening to music and loving music and showing me different music of all sorts. I think that's probably where my ability to like so many genres comes from. My mum played a lot of pop country, my dad played a lot of rock and Elvis, so I think my influences probably stemmed from that.
So, what's coming up for you next? Where we've got the album release. I absolutely can't wait to see this one performed live, especially ‘Today I Woke Up And Chose Violence’. Where will we be seeing you on the road?
The only show we have this year is at Groundwater Country Music Festival on 16-18 October, and then we're basically just gearing ourselves up for touring you for 2027 and 2028. If you're around the Gold Coast at the end of October, that's where we’re doing our album launch of sorts, and where we're going to be doing the first show for this next cycle and phase of our music. Next year, keep an eye out for tour dates.
Self Preservation is out now via Islands Records. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Tori Forsyth on Instagram and Facebook.
