Tash Sultana is surrounded by omens. A rainbow cuts through clouds, a feather hovers along a drafty sidewalk, and butterflies loiter alongside dragonflies over unruly flower beds. After a period of immense loss, Sultana sees each of these occurrences as reminders that their loved ones are near and amid the grief, good things are to come.
“The events that occurred over the last two years were the hardest time of my life,” the singer tells Rolling Stone. “So hard that it honestly almost killed me.”
Around four years after the release of 2021’s acclaimed and ARIA chart-topper, Terra Firma, through their own label Lonely Lands Records, Sultana was hit by a series of unrelenting tragedies. Sitting propped up on a white pillow from their home in Australia, Sultana evenly details the losses: their wife, who had been diagnosed with cancer, underwent a botched surgery; while she prepared for another surgery, Sultana lost both their terminally ill cousin and aunt, who had choked to death; three of their dogs were bitten by a snake and two died in their arms; their grandfather died on a Wednesday and their other dog died on a Sunday. As ticket sales faltered and the singer plummeted into financial ruin, Sultana asked: “What am I doing? Where am I going?”
While most days it was grueling to take on the daily tasks — getting up, eating, showering, brushing their hair — Sultana pushed themselves to walk through the doors of their Melbourne studio, which they had bought following the success of their 2016 breakthrough single “Jungle.” Sultana calls it “the only place I can go that makes me feel normal.” Somedays they put in 10 percent effort, other days would be more fruitful, but it all added up. And Sultana rebuilt their life over the course of those two years, the hours and days that would eventually culminate in their third studio album, Sonic Alchemy, poised to land Feb. 19.
The album cover, reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, depicts a clear potion bottle, “the alchemy,” awash against hues of blue, and a beam of white light shooting through it, emerging as a spectrum of colors on the other side as the other omens (a dragonfly and a butterfly caught in mist, a feather attached to a gold chain with a smoking skull), “the record,” adorn the frame.
Leaving no room for misconception, Sultana states that the LP is “completely based upon my personal life” and about “losing everything that you thought mattered and you identified with — and pulling yourself out of it and starting again.”
The collection spans 11 songs anchored by Sultana’s exhilarating octave range and signature rippling loops that settle into every guitar note, drum beat, and lyric as they move unhurried through the human experiences of (but hardly limited to) love, loss, lust, envy, and joy. Perhaps because of this concerted baring of the soul, Sultana decidedly kept the album “anti-AI” and “proper old school,” reaching to Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page for inspiration and hunting down the original guitars, basses, drums, and microphones that they used to evoke their eras’ distinct soundscapes.
On lead track, “Something in the Water,” Sultana calls attention and sings, “the signs are all around if we wanna let them in/If you can feel, then you can heal and start all over again.” Examining the song, they designate it as the album’s “tone-setter,” adding, “I’m back, shit’s been fucked, but I’m good.”
Adjacently, their newly debuted single, “Don’t Know Why,” was penned after Sultana says they lost everything but their wife and the four walls of their house. “That’s a vulnerable track for me,” says the musician. “I found it really hard to sing it. You can hear points of it where I’m trying to keep it together, voice cracking.”
In a time where tracks are pruned and prodded to perfectly satisfy the algorithm gods, the decision to keep the “mistakes” throughout the LP was intentional. “There’s like certain songs where I fuck up a note or you can hear the metronome bleeding out of my headphones into the microphone,” says Sultana. “I wanted this record to sound live and dynamic, and just totally the opposite way of how everything else is going right now.”
As the album contends with both the past and present, Sultana honored their bedroom recording days and re-recorded “Higher,” an often-requested fan favorite from 2015. The album’s penultimate track, which had only existed on YouTube, was a way to honor those who have stuck with them since the beginning, when the crowds were 50 people gathered in front of a stage.
Sultana, who looks back at their start as “a little busker from Melbourne,” also embraced a more collaborative approach on Sonic Alchemy. A mostly one-person operation who writes, records, and plays nearly all instruments across their work, Sultana collaborated with living legend Snoop Dogg on the standout track, “Push Up On It.” The singer, along with fellow Australian artists Jessica Mauboy and Baker Boy, joined Snoop’s performance for last year’s AFL Grand Final at MCG in East Melbourne. And as their wife and Snoop hotboxed his RV after the pre-game show, Sultana, who doesn’t smoke, was surprised when he told the singer he wanted to work on music together. “For him to do something in my world — him featuring on my shit, not me featuring on his shit, that’s fucked up,” Sultana smiles.
This shift to bring others into their sacred ecosystem has been part of a self-evolution. “I wanted to be able to reflect with other people. I wanted to be able to take another step and and learn more by sharing and letting people into my space,” Sultana says, pointing to their work with Los Angeles-bred R&B band Free Nationals for the elegantly weary and resolute “Bad News.” Sultana muses, “We’ve been friends for 10 years. We’ve been talking about doing a track for 10 years. That’s how long it took to do this.”
Amid the making of the album, Sultana signed a global record deal with BMG with an entirely new team behind them. Shortly after their Australian and New Zealand tour went live, it was announced that the Auckland, Wellington and Perth shows sold out, and second shows were added in all three cities. Sultana’s omens might have something to do with it.
“We’re all human. We’re all going to experience immense loss, suffering — internal, external. We don’t get to pick when it just happens, and it’s how you deal with it,” Sultana says of the last couple of years, emphasizing that every part of the experience was meaningful. “This whole project is the best project that I’ve ever done. Whether it’s commercially received that way, it doesn’t really matter because I know that was the best that I possibly could have done. I didn’t waste any of those hard lessons. I put it into something. I turned hell into magic.”