Brisbane singer/songwriter Lottie McLeod embraces life’s contradictions on “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” and forthcoming sophomore EP ‘The Boathouse,’ pairing breathless crushes with bruising boundaries in a coming-of-age collection where heartbreak and joy are allowed to coexist.
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Stream: “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” – Lottie McLeod
There are worse ways to lose pub trivia than staring at the prettiest person on your team.
One missed question becomes two, then three, and suddenly winning matters far less than getting another Wednesday night beside them. By then, you’re already hoping nobody notices exactly why you keep getting the answers wrong.
Dreamy, intimate, and utterly enchanting, Lottie McLeod’s “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” wraps that helpless little crush in a golden, glistening wash of indie pop. A gentle pulse carries banjo, flute, pedal steel, and softly layered instrumentation beneath McLeod’s especially resonant voice, giving the song the lush glow of late-afternoon sunlight while preserving the awkwardness underneath. She is smitten enough to lose concentration, embarrassed enough to know exactly how ridiculous she looks, and still secretly thrilled by all of it. Sweetness and ache move hand in hand here, making “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” a radiant ode to the humiliating joy of letting one person occupy far too much of your brain.
Honey
you know I can’t keep doing this
spending Wednesdays at the Waterloo
I keep missing the questions
you’re so cute
I made us lose
please forgive me
can you blame me
the game is over now
we’ll get ’em next week baby
Released July 23 via ABC Music, “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” is the final single ahead of McLeod’s sophomore EP, The Boathouse, out September 25. The Brisbane-based singer/songwriter is approaching 21 after five years of making music, and the new seven-track collection follows last year’s deeply personal debut EP Bug. Where that project carried McLeod through first love, grief, and major early-career milestones, The Boathouse captures a young artist learning to trust her judgment, use her voice, and walk away when preserving her own wellbeing demands it. “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” gives that coming-of-age story a welcome flash of levity – proof that growing up also includes getting hopelessly distracted by a cute friend at trivia.
“I want people to listen to this song and feel joyful – it’s so nice to do something light,” McLeod tells Atwood Magazine. “‘Wednesdays at the Waterloo’ was written about the very serious topic of doing terribly at trivia because you’re too busy crushing on someone in your group. Look, I have a lot of crushes and it’s all very harmless and this person is actually my friend, so I’m sure he will find it amusing when he hears it!”
She continues, “I have a good mate here who is also a musician and we’ve known each other for a few years, and he’s just very cute. It’s always been completely platonic, but I just took this one night we went to trivia, me and my best friend and him and his friends and took it to a tongue in cheek romcom place in my brain while in a writing session with my producer! I’m usually so serious in my writing so it was actually so fun just to approach a song with nothing but the fun, awkward and joyful side of a crush.”
McLeod commits beautifully to the bit.
“I feel like I am missing out / on something I don’t even know about,” she admits before revealing the real problem: She is missing out “simply just looking at your mouth.” Later, the fantasy grows bolder – “I have never tasted you / ’cause Zac is always in the room” – yet the song never loses its bashful grin. Attraction keeps disrupting ordinary life until a weekly trivia night becomes romantic theater, every wrong answer buying another excuse to return. Even the chorus lands as both apology and flirtation: You’re so cute / I made us lose / please forgive me / can you blame me? McLeod knows how absurd the predicament is. That self-awareness only makes the crush sweeter.
“I personally resonate so much with a song when I hear it and feel like someone has literally been in my head and managed to articulate the feeling so I was just really wanting reflect how much fun it is to have a crush on someone and how life is all of a sudden worth living hahaha,” she shares. “Saying that I feel like when the person starts to take up lots of brain space and you start to almost block out the world around you… Like when you start not hearing the trivia questions because you’re looking at them.. How humiliating that can feel you know? I think this song captures the exciting/smitten part of having a crush as well as the embarrassing and slightly painful part as well!”
That mix of pleasure and embarrassment is embedded in the production. Written with producer Josh Beattie at Brisbane’s 4000 Studios, “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” floats on crisp drums and softly intermingling acoustic textures, with banjo, flute, and pedal steel adding flashes of color around McLeod’s voice. The arrangement pulses without pushing, creating a sun-soaked reverie whose lightness carries just enough longing to keep the sugar from overwhelming the song. McLeod deliberately pushed herself toward comedy and playfulness here – territory that does not come as naturally to a songwriter accustomed to heavier emotional material. The result has all the giddy momentum of a romantic comedy before anyone has confessed how they feel: McLeod is hopelessly smitten, trying to play it cool while her attention keeps drifting across the table.
Leaning into that lighter side was freeing, but it also pushed McLeod outside her usual songwriting instincts. “I went into the session with the intention of writing something lighthearted because it’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me,” she explains, “and I’ve found sometimes when I try to write any form of love song I always end up cringing half way through and stop!” Laughing, she continues, “Some of my favourite songs are ones that are a little comical, that was also something I wanted to try and achieve. I’m an absolute die-hard ‘90s rom-com lover and it has this energy for me, so I hope that’s what others get from it also!”
Its place on The Boathouse gives all that sunshine extra meaning. “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” follows “Important To You,” the EP’s heaviest track, and McLeod sees it as a necessary release – a reminder that grief, heartbreak, growth, and pleasure do not wait politely for one another to finish. “Two things can be true,” she says: We can carry difficult emotions and still have fun. That freedom glows through one of her sweetest songs yet. “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” lets a crush remain gloriously unserious without treating the joy it creates as trivial – a gentle, lovestruck little marvel about missing the question, losing the game, and already counting the days until next Wednesday.
But to understand just how hard-won that freedom is, move one track backward. “Important To You” is spectacular in a completely different register: Bruised, devastating, and frighteningly direct, a song whose title takes one of love’s most flattering ideas and makes it sound like a burden McLeod can no longer survive carrying. Being important to another person is supposed to mean being cherished. Here, importance has curdled into responsibility – somebody else’s happiness, safety, and reason for living placed on shoulders that were never equipped to bear that weight.
you don’t know the half
of what you’ll put me through
I don’t want to be important to you
I’ll sleep in the dirt ’cause
I can’t sleep under your roof
I don’t want to be important to you
McLeod’s repeated refusal becomes an act of self-preservation, and the song reaches directly into the experience that set The Boathouse in motion.
She began writing the EP in 2025 after ending a relationship she describes as unhealthy, with early elements of coercive control and mental-health threats she was not equipped to manage at 18 and 19 years old. Leaving forced her to make the kind of firm adult decision she had previously relied on her mother to help make – and, crucially, to discover that protecting herself did not make the world collapse.
“Ending that relationship was the first time in my life I had to make firm decisions as an adult and was followed by some difficult conversations I had to have for my own personal wellbeing and for my career,” McLeod shares. “Up until this point I’d always relied on my Mum to do the tough stuff for me. And I think learning that the world won’t fall a part if you maintain your integrity and walk away from things that aren’t working for you, helped me in other areas also.”
If Bug accompanied McLeod through first love and life-changing grief, The Boathouse catches what happens when reflection starts becoming action. She is still yearning, second-guessing, getting hurt, and getting carried away, but she is increasingly able to recognize the line between caring for someone and abandoning herself for them. That growing confidence gives the EP its backbone.
The record still leaves plenty of room for unresolved longing. “Sunburnt,” another spectacular early glimpse of The Boathouse, wraps desire in warm indie pop and subtle alt-country textures, its writing filling with skin, heat, fingerprints, sand, and the physical traces McLeod wishes she could leave behind. Its opening line alone practically contains an entire relationship: “you could be the coldest person ever but the sun still burns.”
out on the ocean just
floating til the calm hits
go on your way now
I’ll swim until I’m seasick
part of me wants
you to notice that I’m sinking
part of me wants you
That water is more than scenery. The Boathouse takes its name from a real place near the water in Meanjin/Brisbane, a spot McLeod associates with peace and with deep conversations shared with people who influenced these songs. “I find the water incredibly cathartic, being in it, near it whatever,” she explains. “So the aquatic imagery is symbolic of growth and healing for me.” “Sunburnt” complicates that image beautifully: McLeod can float toward calm and still find herself seasick, moving forward while part of her hopes somebody notices she is sinking.
That is why the EP’s sequencing hits so beautifully. “Important To You” says, in no uncertain terms, I don’t want to be important to you. One track later, “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” is effectively saying, you’re so cute I made us lose. The distance between those two statements is enormous, and McLeod doesn’t ask us to choose which one represents her more truthfully. Both do.
That may be the most grown-up thing about The Boathouse. McLeod is not presenting adulthood as the moment when every emotion finally arranges itself into the correct order. She is learning to hold competing truths without letting any one of them erase the others. You can know a relationship is hurting you and still struggle with leaving it. You can want somebody who never became yours. You can carry grief and still laugh. You can protect yourself and remain open enough to become hopelessly distracted by somebody’s face across a trivia table.
“I truly hope people hear these songs and remember what I said earlier, that ‘two things can be true,’” McLeod says. “Life is complex. All humans are experience high highs and low lows in life and I just want people to listen to the EP and think, ‘Oh wow it’s completely okay to have big heavy emotions and also have fun.’ Nothing is linear, not grief, not joy, not heartbreak. Hard times come and go and music will always be there to help us through it.”
And suddenly the sunny little trivia song we started with does not seem quite so little anymore.
“Wednesdays at the Waterloo” remains gloriously unserious – thank God – but the joy McLeod allows herself inside it has been earned by everything surrounding it. After “Important To You” draws such a fierce boundary and “Sunburnt” leaves her swimming through unresolved desire, there is real power in hearing her simply enjoy wanting someone again. Growing up doesn’t require getting every answer right. Sometimes it means knowing which questions are no longer yours to answer – and which ones you are perfectly happy to miss because the person sitting beside you is much more interesting.
Atwood Magazine recently caught up with Lottie McLeod to step inside The Boathouse – the difficult boundaries, deep-water imagery, growing creative confidence, and wonderfully unserious crushes shaping a young songwriter learning to trust herself.
In McLeod’s world, the heaviness never cancels the joy; it only makes that joy worth holding onto.
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:: stream/purchase Wednesdays at the Waterloo here ::
:: connect with Lottie McLeod here ::
:: stream/purchase The Boathouse here ::
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Stream: “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” – Lottie McLeod
A CONVERSATION WITH LOTTIE MCLEOD
Atwood Magazine: Lottie, hello and thank you for your time! For those who are just discovering you today through this writeup, what do you want them to know about you and your music?
Lottie McLeod: Hi! Thank you so much for having me… Love Atwood so it’s very cool to do this. For anyone hearing my name for the first time, I’ve been compared to artists like Lizzie McAlpine and Phoebe Bridgers but I think I add a bit of a Role Model sense of humour so you might enjoy listening to my next single if any of this resonates and hopefully that will encourage you to have a listen to more of my catalogue. I’m almost 21, have been making music for about 5 years and am about to release my second EP, called The Boathouse. I’m from so-called Australia but was very fortunate to record a couple of the songs, including the title track, with Caleb Wright in North Carolina last year and loved the experience so while I love home, I hope to do a little more travel with my music in the next couple of years.
Who are some of your musical north stars, and what are you most excited about the music you’re making now?
Lottie McLeod: The list of my musical north stars is loooong, hahah. But I would say Phoebe is a major one. I just adore her raw truth telling and tone. I started listening to Phoebe while my Dad was living with stage 4 brain cancer and fell in love with songwriting as a way of processing my emotions around this time. I also love Christian Lee Hutson, Samia, Andy Shauf. The music coming out of North Carolina is really inspiring me right now, MJ Lenderman, Wednesday… I’ll stop or it will just be my playlists in writing!
Your debut EP Bug came out last year and became such a meaningful milestone for you. What’s your relationship with that project and its songs today?
Lottie McLeod: Bug opened doors for me in so many ways. I met producers who became friends, I learnt who I wanted to be as an artist and also what I didn’t want to do moving forward. By the end of recording it, I had become more confident in what I could bring to a room as a writer and that has been instrumental in my artist development. Bug is incredibly personal to me in so many ways, it was with me through first love, life changing grief and in career moments I dreamt of achieving. I will always have a deep love for ‘Bug’ and what it represents in my career and as a person.
You’ve described your new music as raw and real, and The Boathouse EP feels like a coming-of-age chapter about relationships, people-pleasing, and learning to use your voice. How do you feel this EP captures where you are as an artist right now?
Lottie McLeod: I started writing The Boathouse in 2025 when I’d ended a relationship that felt unhealthy. There was beginning elements of coercive control that felt like could escalate with mental health threats I wasn’t equipped to manage at 18 and 19 years of age. Ending that relationship was the first time in my life I had to make firm decisions as an adult and was followed by some difficult conversations I had to have for my own personal wellbeing and for my career. Up until this point I’d always relied on my Mum to do the tough stuff for me. And I think learning that the world won’t fall a part if you maintain your integrity and walk away from things that aren’t working for you, helped me in other areas also. I spent the process of recording The Boathouse building confidence as a person and as an independent artist. Knowing when to own that I genuinely have something of value to offer, that people are resonating with while also knowing when to say, ‘actually I am not the person for that job, project, opportunity’… Whatever it is. And that’s been freeing. To be turning 21 with a better sense of identity and comfortability in where I’m at and what I still need to learn, again both musically and as a person. That’s what this The Boathouse period represents for me.
What does the title The Boathouse mean to you, and why did it feel like the right place or image to hold these songs together?
Lottie McLeod: We have a restaurant in Meanjin/Brisbane, where I live that is on the water, in the bay area. It’s a beautiful spot inside but actually it’s also just as pretty outside. I’ve always loved the water… I wanted to be a surfer for about 5 minutes as a kid, did lessons for a few months… Fun fact it was after seeing ‘Soul Surfer’ the Bethany Hamilton story! But I got caught in a rip and then quit hahah. Anyway, my point is that I find the water incredibly cathartic, being in it, near it whatever. So the aquatic imagery is symbolic of growth and healing for me. I’ve also had a lot of deep and important conversations with people in my life at this particular spot at home. Conversations with people who influenced the writing on The Boathouse at times. As a symbol it is just a place I love and feel at peace with so it felt like the right title, imagery and general theme for this collection of songs.
Today we’re here to talk about “Wednesdays at the Waterloo,” which might be the sweetest song I’ve ever heard about sabotaging your pub trivia team because you’re distracted by a crush. What’s the story behind this song?
Lottie McLeod: Hahah… Well thank you, I’m glad you like it! I have a good mate here who is also a musician and we’ve known each other for a few years, and he’s just very cute. It’s always been completely platonic, but I just took this one night we went to trivia, me and my best friend and him and his friends and took it to a tongue in cheek romcom place in my brain while in a writing session with my producer! I’m usually so serious in my writing so it was actually so fun just to approach a song with nothing but the fun, awkward and joyful side of a crush.
You’ve said “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” is “a very unserious song,” and that you wanted people to feel joyful listening to it. Was it freeing to let yourself lean into that lighter, sillier side?
Lottie McLeod: Oh definitely but it was also kind of challenging at the same time. I went into the session with the intention of writing something lighthearted because it’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me and I’ve found sometimes when I try to write any form of love song I always end up cringing half way through and stop haha. Some of my favourite songs are ones that are a little comical, that was also something I wanted to try and achieve. I’m an absolute die-hard 90’s rom com lover and it has this energy for me, so I hope that’s what others get from it also!
The chorus is so charming: “You’re so cute, I made us lose / please forgive me, but can you blame me?” How did you want the song to capture that breathless feeling of having a crush?
Lottie McLeod: I personally resonate so much with a song when I hear it and feel like someone has literally been in my head and managed to articulate the feeling so I was just really wanting reflect how much fun it is to have a crush on someone and how life is all of a sudden worth living hahaha. Saying that I feel like when the person starts to take up lots of brain space and you start to almost block out the world around you… Like when you start not hearing the trivia questions because you’re looking at them… How humiliating that can feel you know? I think this song captures the exciting/smitten part of having a crush as well as the embarrassing and slightly painful part as well!
The video has this ‘80s sitcom-style, break-the-fourth-wall energy, and you’ve called yourself a “wannabe comedian.” What did you want the visual world of “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” to bring out in the song?
Lottie McLeod: All I knew is that I wanted it to be set at a trivia night and be visually aligned with the lyrics of the song. It’s actually funny how incredibly similar the video looks compared the night I wrote it about. I basically gave Adam Potts (director/videographer) a bunch of dot points and since I’ve been a fan of his work for a while I was completely comfortable with letting him take creative control from there. I’ve had a friend write and direct my music videos in the past and she’s a film industry pro and I adore her so I was really wanting to make sure I could trust someone like I could trust her with my direction but she moved to London so I needed to find a new person to work with. I think Adam absolutely killed it. I love it so much. I can’t watch a lot of my older music videos because I didn’t have a lot of self confidence at the time and I think it shows a little bit but because I’ve matured and was able to communicate what I wanted so openly, I feel like it came up so well and I couldn’t be more stoked.
How does “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” fit into the larger emotional world of The Boathouse EP?
Lottie McLeod: My song “Important To You” is right before “Wednesdays at the Waterloo,” which is definitely the heaviest song on the EP so I kind of see Wednesdays as a little break and almost as a little reminder that life can be fun as well!! You can go through things like grief and heartbreak but still enjoy life at the same time. It’s easy to feel guilty for it but two things can be true. I think that was a big part of why I wanted a song like this on the EP. There’s another song on it called “Take it Back” which lifts the energy a little also, and my last release “Sunburnt.” I think all of these songs just show the EP is multifaceted from a genre perspective, and that there’s a little something for everyone on it.
You’re heading out on The Boathouse EP tour this October. What are you most excited to bring into the live show with these new songs?
Lottie McLeod: I plan to open the set with WATW to start on a fun high note and get people locked in for the night and I’m really excited to play it live to be honest. I have a loose plan to make the band dance a little too. They may quit but I’m going to give it a crack haha. I also love playing “The Boathouse” live. It’s one of my all-time favourite songs and I just adore playing it. It’s always received well too. So people who have seen my show before have already heard that one but it will probably be slightly tweaked for tour. Those two are high on my list of tracks I’m looking forward to playing.
Do you have any definitive favorites or personal highlights off The Boathouse?
Lottie McLeod: Definitely “Boathouse” that I wrote with Caleb Wright. Caleb reached out after I released “The Line” from Bug. He was super lovely and just complimented the track and mentioned potentially working together down the track. I looked him up and saw that he was one of Samia’s producers. ‘The Baby’ was one of my favourite albums during high school, so to have a compliment from him, being the producer of that was a big deal for me. I was heading to Nashville to support a friend who was playing at CMA Fest and just decided to throw it out to him that if he was around I would include a stop in NC to collaborate. I planned one song, “Important to You” and we did that and then had time to work on a second track, and “Boathouse” is that song. I love Caleb’s production and his BV’s on the track. I have so many favourites on it but this is a true highlight both on the EP and in my career so far.
What do you hope listeners take away from “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” and The Boathouse, and what have you taken away from creating this music and now starting to put it out?
Lottie McLeod: I might be repeating myself a little, but I truly hope people hear these songs and remember what I said earlier, that ‘two things can be true.’ Life is complex. All humans are experience high highs and low lows in life and I just want people to listen to the EP and think, “Oh wow it’s completely okay to have big heavy emotions and also have fun.” Nothing is linear, not grief, not joy, not heartbreak. Hard times come and go and music will always be there to help us through it. It’s absolutely what I’ve learnt or had reinforced I suppose in the creation and release stage of The Boathouse.
In the spirit of paying it forward, who are you listening to these days that you’d recommend to our readers?
Lottie McLeod: I’m obviously beyond excited for Phoebe’s new album but I have on repeat right now Emma Ogier, True Mountain Laurel and always Samia. Always.
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:: stream/purchase Wednesdays at the Waterloo here ::
:: connect with Lottie McLeod here ::
:: stream/purchase The Boathouse here ::
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Stream: “Wednesdays at the Waterloo” – Lottie McLeod
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