“I can't help but dancing all night / The beat has got me losing my mind,” sings Alice Ivy in Howlin’ at the New Moon (feat. Mayer Hawthorne), the opening song of her new album, out today via Helix Records. That positive upbeat attitude is what carries listeners throughout the twelve songs that make up the record, titled Do What Makes You Happy. Packed with collaborations (ten out of the twelve tracks have some featuring), the Australian artist’s new album is celebratory yet also exposes negative thoughts and experiences. Let’s break it down to understand it better.
Alice’s new LP has been cooking slowly bu surely. After her 2020 album Don’t Sleep, which was nominated to several Aria Awards, she had just released a couple of more singles in 2021. In June of 2023, she released Howlin’ at the New Moon as the first single off of the record, and that year, followed by other releases like Broke my Heart and Wildlife. It’s not customary that artists expand the release of a full project so much in time (a year and a half); instead, they release singles just a few months before the entire album so their audience get to know the vibe, concept, and generate hype around it. But Alice likes to do things differently.
I’ve talked about how upbeat and joyous the album is, but as any good artist, Alice has created emotional highs and lows that offer an intense experience to her fans and listeners. There are dreamy, even melancholy-tainted tracks like Broke my Heart (featuring Mallrat and Jelani Blackman), Dandelion (one of the two songs that is just herself), or Do What Makes You Happy (feat. Sam Austins), the song that gives the album its title. In it, she sings: “I’m dreaming that you’ll find your way / I hate to see that you were mapping out a different place (not to me) / It must have been hard to read the conversation / We’re trapped between the walls you built to complicate it / Just tell me what you want your love is domination.”
Titles like Smile, Sticky Situations and All in my Head also allude to being trapped in negative thoughts but also the will to overcome them. If in Smile she sings almost naively “You make me smile make my heart pound / Haven’t felt this in a while, so glad I found ya / I like your style, how you put it down / Feel like a child, how you got my head spinning round,” things go awry in Sticky Situations, where she says: “All over my cone / It’s falling / The summer is burning all the love that I see / I’m out of my dome / I’m toxic / But baby I know, I know, I know its me.”
Before releasing the album, Ivy has been touring stages worlwide including Mexico’s Corona Capital festival, US’ Electric Forest, and UK’s The Great Escape. However, now that the record is finally out, we hope she’ll embark on a tour of concerts so her fans worldwide get the chance to learn the songs and sing their heart out.