2025 is already a big year for Australian pop newcomer Lyric, as she released a brand new single ‘Make a Move’ last month, is about to embark on a UK & Ireland tour next month – with the London show already being sold out – and is currently working on a new EP. The 21-year-old singer is not only a songwriter but also a producer for her own songs, making her a triple threat and someone to look out for on the pop star horizon. We sat down with the creative on a Tuesday morning – for her the evening after she spent all day in the studio – to discuss childhood idols, the musical and visual inspirations behind her artistry, and how running a fan account in her teenage years prepared her for a successful social media presence today.
It all started when Lyric was about eight years old, she remembers. “I had this little diary and I would write song lyrics in it and I would sing them to myself acappella, and then I’d just go in the room to my family and sing them my little songs. I used to love standing in front of my family and my cousins, singing my songs! And I think that’s when I started to realise that I like writing and that being a musician could be fun.” Lyric also explains that her love for music didn’t come out of nowhere as her dad’s side of the family is “pretty musical”. “He taught me how to play piano growing up, and he knows how to play guitar. I got some of my musical abilities from him!” She now mostly plays the piano but also “plays a bit of guitar”. Her production skills on the other hand are completely self-taught, and she only picked it up during her last year of high school. “I just taught myself through YouTube and watching a lot of tutorials. That came much later after the songwriting,”, she explains. Someone she looks up to regarding production specifically is Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother): “He’s just incredible! I learned so much of what I know just by watching videos of him making his songs and listening to him talk about production because we use the same software, Logic. He’s definitely my biggest influence.”
Growing up, Lyric always loved pop music, especially Disney pop stars like Selena Gomez who she would watch on TV. “I was like, I want to do that, this is what I want to do!”, she recalls. Her first proper idol and concert was Taylor Swift. “I was obsessed with her,”, she states, so much so that she also ran online fan accounts dedicated to the pop icon. “I used to love running fan pages and I did have a big Taylor Swift fan page at one point, but I also had a lot of different ones for TV shows and movies that I liked. It’s been a massive help in how I use social media now and it definitely taught me a lot about it. I’m very grateful for it and I think a big part of me being an artist is also the fact I’m such a fangirl!”
Aside from having inspired her social media presence, Lyric also credits Swift as her biggest songwriting influence. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot from her. I’m very inspired by all of the artists that I listen to and I think you can sort of hear that in my music. I love taking inspiration from people where I can.”
In three words, Lyric describes her artistry as independent, creative, and fun. “I make a lot of my stuff by myself, I self-produce, and I’m very proud of that so I’m quite independent. But then I also don’t have a sound, so to speak. I think I’ve discovered my sound now, but at the same time, I just make whatever I like at the moment and whatever song I enjoy making and feel like making that day. If I feel like making a rock song, I’ll make a rock song. If I feel like making a really sad, depressing song, I’ll make a really sad, depressing song.”
Just by one look at her socials, you can tell visuals are a big part of Lyric’s pop-girl persona, and her biggest inspirations for those are all of her favourite films. “When I’m directing my own music videos, I always create a mood board of all my favourite films and TV shows that inspire them. I love exploring cinematography and the visual side of my music.” Her favourite movie of all time is the six-time Academy Award-winning ‘La La Land’. “I actually wrote a song inspired by it!”, she admits, “There’s so much colour in that film! And looking at my album covers, they all have a distinctive colour theme to them. I love using colour in my visuals and I’d say that I take that a lot from that film, 100%!”
Her songwriting is “80%” inspired by her own experiences, the rest by other’s experiences that she can relate to on a personal level. “Sometimes it’s a friend’s experience or maybe it’s something that I watched in a film that I really resonate with. I think that’s fun and opens the perspective a bit more so that I’m not just always writing about the same things.”
Lyric doesn’t seem very patriotic – as being from Australia doesn’t really have anything to do with the artist she is or wants to be – and has big plans and even bigger dreams that extend the borders of her home country. “I think that I’ll end up moving and going to different cities throughout my life, so I don’t think it’s really a matter of being tied down to one place. I don’t think it would be any different for me if I lived anywhere else in the world. I think I’d still be making the same kind of music and reaching the same sort of people. And that’s the cool thing about today’s music industry with social media playing a part.”
Over the last few years of releasing music, Lyric says that she definitely started writing songs that are a lot truer to herself. “Sometimes I go back and look at my early songs and I’m like, oh, that wasn’t 100% how I was feeling, whereas now the music that I’m putting out is like really, really true to me, really personal experiences. And I feel like I’m a lot more vulnerable now with my music than I ever was. The project I’m working on at the moment which will be coming out later on in the year is really personal and I probably wouldn’t have been comfortable putting out songs like that two or three years ago. I think I’ve definitely evolved in that way!”
Although she stayed “pretty consistent” with her general music style – she calls it “sad girly pop songs” and laughs – she now likes to experiment with it more. “I’ve also gotten a few more rockier songs nowadays than I did back in the day!”, she smiles. “We’ll be making music that I like that is also music that I would enjoy listening to!”
Lyric’s most recent song ‘Make a Move’ is inspired by no other than pop royalty Chappell Roan and her song ‘Red Wine Supernova’. She further elaborates: “On my last tour at the end of last year, which was also my first, I was covering ‘Red Wine Supernova’ by Chappell Roan. It was so much fun to cover it and every night I would feel so confident whenever that song came on. It was so empowering, cool and fun to sing with a crowd, and I could tell that it made them feel confident too! So I really wanted to write something like that. It hasn’t inspired the theme of the song but more the feeling. ‘Make a Move’ is self-assured and about feeling yourself and hot and cool and I was thinking about performing it on stage when I wrote it!”
Performing live is Lyric’s favourite part of this extravagant job. “I love it so much!”, she beams, “I just love being on tour and with my friends, it’s amazing! I think I’ve gotten a lot more used to it. Obviously, everyone still gets a bit nervous before they go on stage but I don’t really get stage fright or anything. I just feel at home up there”. The Sydney show of her first tour will always be unforgettable to her as it was a pivotal moment in her career and a sign that she was doing exactly what she was meant to all along. “It was definitely the biggest room that I’d ever played, and I walked out on stage and was just shocked by how many people there were. It was a crazy feeling to see everyone in one room, and I think that has definitely stuck with me a lot because it was the first time I’d ever really seen that and heard how loud people can be when they’re all together. It was very memorable. I’ll never forget that.”
Our last question for Lyric is, if she could give any advice to her younger self, what would it be? She hesitates for a moment, deep in thought. “I think for a long time when I was growing up, and when I first started putting out my first few songs a few years ago, I was really scared to show them to people. I didn’t even tell that many about it. It took me ages to even tell all my family. So I think my advice would be, it doesn’t matter! You don’t need to worry that much. Just post about it online, and tell your friends about it. It’s not embarrassing! It’s not crazy! No one cares! You’re putting yourself out there and that is cool in itself, that is what matters!”, she smiles reassuringly. “It took me quite a while to get over that so I think that’s what I would say to younger me. And then hopefully maybe she would have gotten over that a bit earlier!” And we agree that sometimes, you just have to “embrace the cringe” to be two steps ahead of everyone else.
As Lyric continues to carve her path from acappella songs in her family’s room to sold-out international shows, one thing is clear – her self-taught artistry as well as her self-taught fearlessness is what sets her apart. Whether she’s writing and producing tracks in the studio or sharing her creative world in visuals, she’s doing it on her own terms. Lyric isn’t just “making a move” – she’s working on making her mark.
Written by Vicky Madzak
https://laylo.com/musicbylyric/m/UKtour
GEM Magazine 