Cult Artists presents Noah Hill

Noah Hill, best known as one fifth of acclaimed Australian band Parcels, has stepped out under his own name with his debut solo single, 'It's All in My Head', out now via Because Music. Along with the single, Noah has announced headline shows in Sydney and Melbourne this July, with shows scheduled for the UK, EU and US in September. The song was written over Christmas at Hill's family home in the Northern Rivers of NSW, during what he describes as one of the more disorienting periods of his life. A relationship had ended. A health scare followed, bringing with it a spiral of anxiety and a destabilising sense of the future. "It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me," he says. "I sort of fell apart." Even his footing within Parcels - in the middle of the band's biggest year of touring - felt suddenly uncertain. "Whether that extreme lifestyle on tour would be sustainable for me," he reflects, "started to feel like a real question." What emerged from that period is a song about trying to calm a racing mind about fear, and how disorienting life can feel when you're caught inside your own anxiety. Minimal and vocal-forward, with a quiet restlessness running beneath the surface, it carries the feeling, Hill says, of "running away from something like I'm desperate to get out of myself. But in the end, there's no real running from that. The only thing to do is face it." It doesn't perform its anxiety so much as sit with it, arriving eventually at something closer to acceptance than resolution. The song was, by Hill's own admission, hard won. "I worked very hard on this one, much more than any of the others. It was a true battle, which makes sense, because I was battling my mind at the time." That struggle is audible, not as roughness, but as weight. Hill produced and mixed the track entirely himself, and the intimacy shows. The video for ‘It's All in My Head’ was filmed in Sydney and co-directed by Noah Hill and longtime friend Cai Leplaw, who lived through many of the moments that inspired Noah's upcoming music. "When the time came to visually represent these songs, there was no better person to help tell the story," says Hill. The video tries to capture the anxiety at the heart of the song, spiralling overthinking, and the inner voices that make the future feel doomed. "Me literally running from and confronting myself," Hill explains, "until at last trying to push through to a place of freedom." It's a striking introduction to an artist operating on his own terms for the first time. After years within the collaborative framework of Parcels, Hill has found a quieter, more exposed register rooted in folk and acoustic pop, plainspoken where it could easily be overwrought, and shaped by a period of life he is clearly still making sense of.