“A towering solo debut” 4.5 Stars – Rolling Stone
‘Sabrina Lawrie sounds like a matte-black, heavily tinted 1971 Dodge Charger – equally capable of a low purr as she is a full-throated roar.” – Rolling Stone
"Sabrina is a dazzling guitar player and a composer of ambitious, complex songs that reach far beyond simple verse-chorus-solo format" - Sydney Morning Herald
"Riding in on a typhoon of gigantic rock riffs and triple-smoked vocals... Sabrina tells the audience ‘music isn’t a competition, it’s an army" - Howl and Echoes
"Her music roars with the spirit of Janis Joplin and the poetry of Patti Smith" - Heavy and Weird Press
Australian music hasn’t thrown up too many genuine auteurs – figures whose creative vision and breadth of skills encompasses and infuses the entire process of making a record. Think of artists like Prince or Björk. Lawrie is one such figure. She is the rarest of the rare.
Sabrina does it all. She is a great songwriter, a superb live performer, a crack guitarist (and pretty much anything else she wants to play), and a singer of enormous power and depth.
Sabrina plays a mixture of dark pop, brooding stoner rock and psychedelia, all of it topped by a voice that has no right to explode from such a tiny frame. Her shape-shifting songs, which rarely follow conventional structures, are by turns aggressive and restrained, mind-bendingly strange, and often eerily beautiful.
We’ve been waiting for her first solo album (with her band The Hunting Party) seemingly forever, which she’s been recording with Darek Mudge at The Shed. It’s been brewing like a fine wine. Songs have come and gone, been written and re-worked and re-made.
There’s also been a trip to LA, during which time she hooked up with the Silver Chords, played festivals with bands including the Black Angels and the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and made friends and jammed with Nick Oliveri and Dave Catching (earthlings?, Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) until her visa ran out.
Lots of real-life shit has happened, too. Her first child Quinn arrived two years ago. Earlier this year, with recording all but complete, a serious, near-fatal fall saw her hospitalised with a broken back, ribs and left wrist. With a plate of eight screws in her back, Sabrina will be setting off airport metal detectors for the rest of her life.
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