Tash Sultana Turns Two Years of Loss Into 'Sonic Alchemy,' Due Feb. 19

Tash Sultana's third studio album, Sonic Alchemy, lands Feb. 19, and the Melbourne musician built it out of the worst two years of their life. "The events that occurred over the last two years were the hardest time of my life," Sultana told Rolling Stone. "So hard that it honestly almost killed me."

The losses came in an unbroken sequence. Sultana's wife, diagnosed with cancer, underwent a botched surgery. While she prepared for another operation, Sultana lost a terminally ill cousin and an aunt, who choked to death. Three of their dogs were bitten by a snake; two died in their arms. Their grandfather died on a Wednesday; another dog died on a Sunday. Ticket sales faltered, financial ruin followed, and Sultana asked: "What am I doing? Where am I going?"

The album answers that question. Sultana calls the record "completely based upon my personal life" — "losing everything that you thought mattered and you identified with — and pulling yourself out of it and starting again."

How do you make a record out of grief?

Sultana kept walking through the doors of their Melbourne studio, bought after the success of the 2016 breakthrough single "Jungle." They call it "the only place I can go that makes me feel normal." Some days brought 10 percent effort. The hours accumulated anyway, over roughly two years, alongside Terra Firma, the 2021 ARIA chart-topper released on Sultana's own Lonely Lands Records.

The 11 songs span love, loss, lust, envy and joy, anchored by Sultana's octave range and rippling loops. The cover nods to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon: a potion bottle pierced by a beam of white light, framed by a dragonfly, a butterfly, and a feather on a gold chain with a smoking skull.

Lead track "Something in the Water" sets the tone — in Sultana's words, "I'm back, shit's been fucked, but I'm good." The single "Don't Know Why," written after Sultana says they lost everything but their wife and four walls of their house, was harder to deliver. "You can hear points of it where I'm trying to keep it together, voice cracking," they said.

The album is deliberately "anti-AI" and "proper old school," drawing on Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page. Sultana hunted down the original guitars, basses, drums and microphones those eras used. The mistakes stayed in.

"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," Sultana said. "I wanted this record to sound live and dynamic, and just totally the opposite way of how everything else is going right now."

What changes for a self-made studio operator?

Plenty. Sultana, once "a little buser from Melbourne" who writes, records and plays nearly all instruments alone, opened the door to collaborators. Snoop Dogg features on "Push Up On It" — a pairing that emerged after Sultana, Jessica Mauboy and Baker Boy joined Snoop's performance at last year's AFL Grand Final at the MCG in East Melbourne. Snoop proposed working together while hotboxing his RV with Sultana's wife; Sultana doesn't smoke. "For him to do something in my world — him featuring on my shit, not me featuring on his shit, that's fucked up," Sultana said.

The Los Angeles R&B band Free Nationals appear on the "elegantly weary" track "Bad News." "We've been friends for 10 years. We've been talking about doing a track for 10 years," Sultana said. "That's how long it took to do this."

The album also re-records "Higher," a fan favorite that existed only on YouTube since 2015, as its penultimate track — a nod to listeners from the days of 50-person crowds.

Sultana also signed a global record deal with BMG, with an entirely new team behind them. When the Australian and New Zealand tour went live, Auckland, Wellington and Perth sold out, and second shows were added in all three cities.

Sultana frames the whole project plainly: "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."