Australian indie rock singer/songwriter Angie McMahon is at once intimate and all-consuming, unfiltered and raw throughout “Untangling,” a dramatic, visceral unveiling of her heavy heart and aching soul taken off her recently-released EP, ‘Light Sides.’
Stream: “Untangling” – Angie McMahon
The latest Angie McMahon release is a masterclass in cinematic vulnerability.
The Australian indie rock singer/songwriter is at once intimate and all-consuming, unfiltered and raw throughout “Untangling,” a dramatic, visceral unveiling of her heavy heart and aching soul. It’s a cathartic confessional that doesn’t so much swoop high as it does spread out all around us; from the steady, percussive pulse of the drums and bass to a deeply expressive, effected, radiant electric guitar melody, McMahon creates a world into which artist and audience alike dwell in life’s depths.
Carefully, she picks open emotional scars, allowing us in to a private therapy session where she candidly acknowledges, just as she did throughout her last album, 2023’s Light, Dark, Light Again, her own perceived shortcomings and failings – and how she ultimately overcame them in order to persevere through hardship.
I didn’t want to stay the same
I didn’t want to hear the change walk in
I didn’t want to hurt you and
It’s always going to start and end
With I didn’t want pain, with I was afraid
With I didn’t want pain, with I was afraid
I needed rewiring
And breaking this open
meant starting a riot
My least favourite feeling
Is hurting someone
’cause I was slow at healing
“It was written about someone who is deeply entwined in my life, so I never felt like either the song or the untangling itself was entirely finished,” McMahon says of ‘Untangling,’ which she released in mid-August.
Following July’s single “Just Like North” (which Atwood praised as “a special song that hits home for anyone going through hard times… [it] reads like poetry and bleeds raw emotion”), “Untangling” arrived alongside news of a fresh Angie McMahon EP, Light Sides (released September 13, 2024), which serves as a five-track companion to Light, Dark, Light Again.
Not so much ‘happy’ songs as they are ‘hopeful’ (or rather, ‘cautiously optimistic’), Light Sides’ tracks seem to capture McMahon’s journey out from the wreckage she so powerfully sang of (and through) in her last LP.
That record ultimately served as an emotional triumph for her as well, featuring both her “inner reckoning and redemption,” but nothing from last year, except perhaps the album’s spellbinding finale, “Making It Through,” compares to the sense of freedom, liberation, and hard-won release that permeates “Untangling.”
I dropped out of my old shape
And the moves that I made up to twist
So I fit some place
Now I lift weights, and I feel safe
I’m not so afraid
I’ve got something I’m proud of
Growing from something
that I’m growing out of
It was a joint misadventure
I am untangling you from my centre
I am untangling you from my centre
Whether or not we’ve gone through our own ‘untangling,’ Angie McMahon’s performance is yet again singular and stunning, beautiful and breathtaking.
One can’t help feel the weight lift from their shoulders as McMahon reaches the final minute, her spirited voice ringing out as she rises our of pain, resolved to hold her head high and look forward, not backward. “I am untangling you from my centre,” she declares in her most powerful mantra, and chorus, yet. “I am untangling you…” We won’t always be happy, and we won’t always be able to avoid heartache, but we are not our pain; we are not our suffering; we are not our agony.
Angie McMahon has been singing truth to power for six years now, and “Untangling” may very well be her most exceptional offering to date – but if anything, it’s just proof that the indie rock singer/songwriter from Melbourne/Naarm is firing on all cylinders.
Listen to this incredible song, alongside the rest of McMahon’s brand new Light Sides EP, wherever you get your music.
Go angel, it’s okay,
sometimes things are gonna feel this way
Go angel, it’s okay,
sometimes things are gonna feel this way…
I am untangling you from my centre…
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Stream: “Untangling” – Angie McMahon
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