Naarm/Melbourne artist Rowena Wise releases her sophomore album Bad Things Feel Good*, out now. The bold and deeply intimate record further establishes her as one of Australia’s most exciting voices in indie folk. Produced by Rob Muinos, the record blends intimate live-band performances with Wise’s incisive songwriting, examining identity, relationships, and self-discovery with remarkable emotional clarity. Rich in nuance and lyrical depth, the album marks a significant artistic leap for an artist whose audience continues to grow both at home and internationally.
Wise will support the album with tours in both Australia and New Zealand this Sept/Oct/Nov. Additional International dates and a North American tour will be announced soon. Further tour details and ticket info below.
Earlier in the week Rowena shared ‘Unlearning Of Love‘, the final single and last window into the record before it opened up completely. ‘Unlearning Of Love’ is the sound of someone dismantling everything she was taught about love, all the exclusivity and possession and devotion drawn tightly around two people, and standing in what’s left. It began with new friendships that lived somewhere between platonic and romantic: two people sitting side by side “like you’re both driftwood”, offering comfort without answers. The song circles one quiet question (what defines a good friend?) and a harder one beneath it: can you hold someone’s hand without trying to own it? It doesn’t grip. It opens.
“Non-monogamy was part of the context in which I wrote this song,” says Wise. “I was experiencing the confusion of loving multiple people at once, but more than that, I was wondering what a new connection could become when there were fewer assumptions or expectations around it. There was a real tension in not knowing where friendship ended and romance began, or whether it needed to become either. That openness could feel scary and obscure, but it was also exciting, meaningful and incredibly expansive. Getting to know people in that more open way taught me as much about myself as it did about others – how differently people love, communicate, attach and move through the world.”
That uncertainty is the song’s gravitational force. “Changing your fundamental beliefs about love can feel destabilising, like your identity is cracking open,” she explains. “I wrote ‘I’m coming apart for the slow unlearning of love’ to capture that internal rupture. To unlearn is to dismantle something that once felt like truth. It can feel pretty daunting and destructive to let go of the frameworks that shaped your sense of self. But within that unravelling, there’s expansion.”
Every song on Bad Things Feel Good* worries at the same tension: whether love can exist without possession, silence, or sacrifice. The singles have circled it from a distance. ‘Blood Ties’ sat with the silence handed down through family; ‘Diamond In The Rough’ examined the loneliness of being seen as exceptional; ‘Home In This World’ looked up at the night sky and felt both small and part of everything. ‘Unlearning Of Love’ walks up and asks it point-blank. It is where the album’s thesis finally says its own name: unlearning can be as powerful as knowing, and to be vulnerable is radical.
Bad Things Feel Good* is a tender, point-blank look at the pain of transformation, and what it means to be flesh and blood. It defines love and selfhood as a mosaic of light and dark, where the rules of negotiating desire, responsibility, devotion, and self-authenticity no longer hold. Through candid poetic lyricism and raw live band production, the songs explore themes of heartbreak, estrangement and mental health, grounding the complexities of the human experience with relatability and emotional depth.
Written over the last couple of years of Wise’s extensive touring schedule, the album was carved out of her own and her friends’ experiences of navigating the nuances of complicated relationships and mental health. The feeling of displacement that came with travelling so often allowed her some perspective on the knottier growing pains of adulthood, love that deviates, longing that is existential, and moral vertigo. Wise wrote the album from a place of exploring intimacy in its many forms, romantic, familial, communal, and the quiet inheritances we carry from them.
Where Wise’s previous album, Senseless Acts of Beauty (2024), explored love, loss and the slow rebuilding of self, shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize, this record traces the uncomfortable in-between, the knowing and the unknowing, the harm and the pleasure, the tenderness and the damage that can exist in the same breath. There are parents who loved imperfectly, partners who loved too much or not enough, and selves that are slowly shedding old skins. Again and again, the characters in these songs are caught between what feels good and what is good, asking whether growth must always arrive through suffering, and whether love can exist without possession, silence, or sacrifice.
Wise reflects, “I thought I had metabolised the growing pains of adulthood in the last decade. In reality, I’ve been wobbling on a pedestal of ‘overcoming’ that I created. I have been careless with my heart, dishonest to myself about what I want and who I am. Now I don’t know who I am, but I do know that I just want to be human, to be at peace with the messiness of life without continuing to try to tell a clean, novel story about it.”
The record was made the way it sounds: live, in a room, fast. Producer Rob Muinos cut the album over three days at The Ratshack in Collingwood with Richard Bradbeer on bass, Jess Ellwood on drums and Matt Dixon on pedal steel. Muinos and Ellwood are the same pairing at work on Julia Jacklin’s forthcoming album The Gem. Nothing here is over-handled. The band moves with patience and restraint, and Wise’s vocal takes are kept live: they soar, then crumble in the delicate moments. The result holds space rather than demands attention. You feel like you’re allowed passage into something deeply personal, within the songs’ messenger and within yourself.
As Wise puts it, the final single is about “breaking apart just enough to rebuild a way of loving that feels freer, kinder, and more communal: a love that doesn’t cage, but connects.” Bad Things Feel Good* finishes the sentence.
To celebrate the launch of her new album, you can catch Rowena live this Friday 7th August for a solo in-store performance and signing at Soundmerch in Collingwood (from 6-8pm). She will also be hosting a Bandcamp Listening Party on Tue 11th at 7:00 PM AEST. For more details and to RSVP click here. Rowena then sets off on an extensive AU/NZ tour, tickets and further tour details below.
Pre-order / pre-save Bad Things Feel Good* here.
Presented by Slack Agency, Beloved Records and Under The Radar (SOLO)
Thu 24 Sept — Kerikeri — Turner Centre Theatre Bar
Fri 25 Sept — Auckland — Old Folks Association
Sat 26 Sept — Raglan — The Yard
Sun 27 Sept — Oakura — Dawn
Sat 3 Oct — Wellington — Vogelmorn
Presented by Double J, Beloved Records & Remote Control Records
Thu 15 Oct — Melbourne (VIC) — Howler
Fri 16 Oct — Castlemaine (VIC) — The Bridge Hotel
Thu 22 Oct — Blue Mountains (NSW) — NightSky
Fri 23 Oct — Sydney (NSW) — The Vanguard
Sat 24 Oct — Thirroul (NSW) — Thirroul Railway Hotel
Thu 29 Oct — Brisbane (QLD) — Black Bear Lodge
Fri 30 Oct — Mapleton (QLD) — Mapleton Pub
Sat 7 Nov — Adelaide (SA) — Grace Emily Hotel
Fri 13 Nov — Hobart (TAS) — Altar Bar
Fri 20 Nov — Fremantle (WA) — Mojo’s (solo)
Sun 22 Nov — Margaret River (WA) — The River (solo)
Tickets via rowenawise.com
28 May 2026
Announced: Rowena Wise – Bad Things Feel Good* + ‘Diamond In The Rough’
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