'I'm An Extreme Personality': Ali Barter Gets Very Honest For Her Second Album

Melbourne indie artist Ali Barter is putting her best foot forward with album number two, Hello, I’m Doing My Best. Following up her 2017 debut, A Suitable Girl, Barter continues to unapologetically play music from her unique perspective. While that might mean its, at times, unusual subject matter for indie-pop, she always speaks from a place of experience. 

“Everything I’m singing about is true, so I’m just being honest, and I think it’s important that we talk about this stuff, because for me, I’ve experienced intense shame around addiction, eating issues, and in my experience, the more I talked about it, the more I shared it, the more freedom I get from it. So if someone tells me that they’ve done something really fucked up or really terrible, if I have this little deep, dark secret inside me that makes me feel like I’m the only one who’s ever felt like that, then I feel less alone,” Barter says.

Single Ur A Piece Of Shit is immediately catchy, complete with some satisfying swears that will get any bathroom mirror or front-row singer going. If you dig a bit deeper though, the song is a heavy listen. “The song is basically about, and dedicated to, my friends; the women I’ve gone through life from my teens until now [with], and all our problems growing up. We still have problems now and we’re in our 30s,” Barter explains. 

Talking about the film clip, which sees Barter assume several personas who each, quite strikingly, meet their end, she says she was inspired by the film Heathers. “I was inspired by that visually, but I was also thinking about how there’s all these aspects to our personality and we're often trying to fix them or whatever. So I thought it would be a cool idea to play all these extreme aspects of a personality and then kill them all.”

The film clip is both poppy and quite graphic at times – almost shocking if you’re not paying attention and expecting just a standard sing-and-play-along piece. That was deliberate on Barter’s part. “I am quite graphic! I swear a lot, I’m an oversharer, I’m very into extreme things,” she says without hesitation. “[The style] is very much me. I wanted it to be more graphic but we’ve toned it down a lot so we didn’t have to have an age restriction on it and stuff like that. So yeah, I guess in this record in general, the lyrical content is a lot more raw and extreme I guess. And I wanted to match that in my video clips. I’m an extreme personality. And I think in the last record I wasn’t giving myself fully because I was on a path to working out how to express myself, whereas on this one I was like, ‘Nup.' I like horror movies, I like blood, I like being super honest, and so that’s why it’s the way it is.”

Like her debut album and its single Girlie Bits, with Hello, I’m Doing My Best, Barter plays on the contrast between her quite lovely-sounding vocals and the depths she can explore in both her lyrics and musicality. Initially ill at ease with the contrast, now it’s something she happily owns. “I’m way more ok with me and my sound and I love it now. But you know, it’s a universal struggle for a human to be ok with themselves and my voice is just one aspect of that. But yes, now I’m proud of it and how my vocal training helps me, rather than feeling like I need to be cooler or darker or smokier or whatever – I can see how useful it is,” she says. “But I think that, obviously my voice is my voice. It doesn’t matter how dirty everything else is, my voice is still going to sound like a bell, like a bloody choir girl.”

With this record, Barter just wanted to get in and get it done. “I wanted it to be simpler, sonically simpler," she explains. "We had three recording sessions at Head Gap and we tracked everything. I didn’t want to have 15 guitars, I wanted to have one guitar, one drum track, wanted to just sing the vocal lines five times then just pick one. I wanted just [to] make things simpler and not chip away at things for ages. The writing process was actually longer, I probably started writing in the middle of 2017 and probably started [recording] in October in 2018... So I guess it was more that I wanted it to be less produced, and think less about it. It was, ‘Let’s book three days and go in and do the songs we have and then figure it out.'"

While Barter is still happy to live in the alternative scene, her ultimate aim is, of course, to find as many listeners as possible. “I’ve started thinking about the next record, and it’s going to be more pop,” she says enthusiastically. “I did the first record, and then I wanted to swing back and go more raw [with this one], and now I’m ready to go full pop. So that’s the thing. And I think as any artist refines their idea the more immediate it becomes to the audience, and more accessible. So I’m clear on what I’m saying and how I’m saying it, and so people can be like, ‘Right, I get it.’ So that’s my goal always, making it as clear as possible and refining my idea and hopefully people understand it.”