When desire loses its direction - with no person or object to pin itself to - it has a strange tendency to turn us toward the past. We find ourselves surveying past infatuations and failed romances. Armed with the knowledge of hindsight, previous entanglements reconfigure and reveal themselves. Sometimes, we become privy to the true nature of our attraction, or learn the patterns that have played out across our romantic lives to which we have been blind. Nothing can be quite as bracing or mortifying.

Emma Russack would know. These reassessments and revelations stretch across About The Girl, her brilliant, searching sixth record, produced by Russack and long-time collaborator John Lee at Phaedra Studios. This is an album about longing’s impossible force, tackling how relationships both muddle and illuminate one’s sense of self. Russack says the record is partly inspired by the dissociations brought on by dating apps. “It’s about the funny experiences that happen when you’re untethered” she says, “I had these awful experiences and encounters, that made me also reflect on my past experiences with different people, romantic or otherwise.”

Often, Russack sings in a daze, trying to grasp the contours of memories that have blurred. But she hauls specificity back with hard-won vigour, pasting details together and creating new constellations of understanding. In the thrall of past experience, Russack’s songwriting reaches new heights; merging plain-spoken disclosures with mordant humour. History’s constant murmur is felt through the record’s spectral, spacious sound, full of elegant harmonies, heavily strummed guitar and ominous synths that reverberate and splutter.

Fascination sits at the glistening centre of the record. It appears in full-force on the title track, a beguiling synth-pop song about the allure of the inscrutable. Russack was thinking about Todd Field’s Tar, but also the brilliant and puzzling people in her own life who are full of persuasive charm (Russack perfectly verbalises that eternal predicament we often find ourselves in with friends: “go out for one drink, stay out for more”). For the song, Russack had imagined a wave of strings, but ended up doing the parts herself, modulating her voice to replicate orchestral movements. The results are hypnotic and sly.

Obsession is also the subject of ‘In 2001’, a diaristic track where Russack recounts her consuming adoration with Dave Grohl as a preteen. “My friend and I would go to the payphone on a weekend, call the telephone directory in the U.S.A. and ask for a David Grohl in Virginia, where he lived at the time,” says Russack. Its particular genius is how it braids together the titanic feelings of a formative crush with the arrival of the home computer. Here, desire is not only relegated to daydreams, but finds a new conduit in technology - which, as we know, will come to absorb our attention not unlike romance does. With hushed vocals and delicate finger-picked guitar, the song has a profound intimacy, as if Russack might be recording from her childhood bedroom.

She may be looking back, but Russack is acutely aware of the cyclical nature of existence. “Fragile, I have become, a lifetime of reruns,” she sings on ‘Time’, a lamentation on how those head-spinning heights of adoration grow elusive as one gets older, and more used to disappointment. The sound is similarly mournful, with Russack singing with a breathy languor, as murky synths ripple throughout.

That’s not to say that growth is impossible. ‘That’s Not Free’ contains the realisation that the impulse to win or prove oneself after the end of a relationship helps no one. “Or even striving to win in any kind of argument or disagreement,” says Russack, “learning that it doesn’t equal freedom.”

And then there is ‘Everything is Big’, a tender, booming track where personal crises tangle with the wider calamities of the world. There’s a rattling urgency here, with swelling harmonies (provided by musician Nathalie Pavlovic), fuzzy guitar lines and contemplative vocals. The song asks: how do we determine what is trivial, and how does one establish personal hierarchies of importance? Russack knows that sometimes we can only be certain of our own small desires: “I just wanna see you around.”

Emma Russack was born in the coastal town of Narooma, NSW. She first gained traction as a teenager, belting out covers of Joy Division and Neil Young on her YouTube channel. She has spent the past decade performing across Australia and Europe, as well as releasing a string of beautifully spare, and oftentimes impish, records on loss and devotion. Her previous full-length solo albums include the Australian Music Prize nominated Winter Blues (2019), Permanent Vacation (2017), In a New State (2016), You Changed Me (2014) and Sounds of Our City (2011). She has also recorded several duet records with musician Lachlan Denton, and plays in the group Snowy Band. She lives in Melbourne.