Though happily married and sober, Melbourne songwriter and guitarist Ali Barter wouldn’t dare write about anything so peaceful. Barter’s muse is the thrilling turbulence of young adulthood, and the lasting resonance of the bad decisions one makes in their early 20s. On her new record Hello, I’m Doing My Best, these themes coalesce with the confidence and immediacy of 2000s pop-rock. The result is an emotionally nuanced album that never takes itself too seriously.
Barter’s debut, 2017’s A Suitable Girl, was a lovably slapdash collection of, in the words of one beloved teen film, “angry girl music of the indie-rock persuasion”—feminist pop-rock that angled for everywoman relatability. That formula worked well for Barter, with the singles “Girlie Bits” and “Cigarette” achieving modest success in her home country. Many of the songs on A Suitable Girl, though, suffered from a certain anonymity. Her bid for universality resulted in lines like “What’s a woman made of?/Something glorious”—well-intentioned but nevertheless a little hackneyed.
Hello, I’m Doing My Best makes no such attempts, instead leaning full-tilt into Barter’s loose-cannon instincts. She draws herself as an indie rock Fleabag, a self-deprecating and hard-drinking flirt who texts her crushes at 3 a.m. and listens to “Malibu” to get through the hangover the next morning. From its earliest moments—the Hole reference comes in the very first line—Hello, I’m Doing My Best is appealingly frank. “Ur a Piece of Shit,” the second track, is a bombastic love letter to a friend in crisis: “You got your daddy issues,” Barter sings. “It made you real suspicious/That’s why you hacked in his account.” She wastes no time with poetics, and while it’s a risky move—she ends up rhyming “drugs” with “drugs”—it displays a kind of gonzo commitment to the album’s messy, diaristic heart.
With loud and unadorned production, Hello, I’m Doing My Best taps into a current of emotive, candid pop-rock typified by the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack and currently practiced by the likes of Charly Bliss and Bully. There’s not an ounce of crunch or grit here, just clean, sanded-down edges and lacquered finishes. The production—handled by Barter’s husband, Oscar Dawson of the band Holy Holy—adds an early-2000s patina, giving the record the pleasing accessibility of teen classics like Avril Lavigne’s Let Go.
Hello, I’m Doing My Best often reads as a guidebook for young adults learning to navigate the world, and in that light, Barter’s no-bullshit lyricism is punkish and endearing. On “Ur a Piece of Shit,” for example, she gleefully calls on listeners to “put your hands up” for various messed-up teenage experiences, like “eating disorders,” “if a doctor touched you,” and “if it felt good to cut yourself.” In moments like these, Barter resembles a young Liz Phair, writing with a shamelessness that few songwriters since have really relished. Lines like, “I heard you like Tool, yeah/And you got really cool hair/And I think that you should be my boyfriend” feel directly indebted to Phair, and the chorus of “History of Boys” (“I used to get drunk and blackout/I used to get drunk and tell you I need you”), while hewing closer to pop than anything Phair wrote in her early days, owes its gutsiness to her.
It helps that Barter never lets a linear personal narrative define these songs. The only time she writes about her now-husband, on “Backseat,” she revisits a time before they met, hinting at the future by declaring that “we’d be perrrrrfect” alongside a grandiose Guitar Hero-style solo. “January,” a dejected highlight on an otherwise frenetic album, stops in at one of life’s Sisyphean checkpoints: the hope of magically becoming a better person come New Year’s Day. “I made it through the year again with Diet Coke and cigarettes,” she sings. It could be any year; life, Barter seems to say, runs on a loop, and despite all we think we’ve learned, no amount of personal growth is certain to prevent mistakes. Even hindsight rarely makes everything clear. At least Hello, I’m Doing My Best makes it sound like a blast.
Buy: Rough Trade
