All photos by Nick Mckk
There are some records that arrive with answers, and others that are brave enough to arrive with questions. ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ (22Twenty) by Rowena Wise slots itself firmly to the latter. Her sophomore album is shaped by contradiction: tenderness alongside hurt, intimacy alongside estrangement, uncertainty alongside the instinct to keep moving forward. Rather than attempting to make sense of the complications of being human, Wise allows imperfection to remain visible while finding something quietly illuminating within it.
Written, composed and performed by Wise, ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ is an intimate and unflinching exploration of love, identity and mental health. Across raw, live-band arrangements and candid, poetic songwriting, she traces the emotional terrain of heartbreak and alienation, as well as the subtler experience of watching a familiar sense of self begin to shift. There is vulnerability here, but Wise approaches difficult emotional territory with curiosity and self-awareness, allowing complexity to exist without forcing it into a convenient conclusion.
The album’s title offers perhaps the clearest glimpse into that sensibility. ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ initially sounds like a deceptively simple declaration, but the asterisk changes everything. It suggests an imaginary footnote waiting to qualify the statement, an ever-expanding list of exceptions and complications. The humor is understated, but the idea is profound: sometimes the things that hurt us can also transform us; sometimes what feels destructive in the moment becomes part of a much larger process of understanding. That does not make pain good, nor does growth erase it. It simply acknowledges that human experience rarely operates according to such clean distinctions.
Produced by Rob Muinos, the album brings together additional performances from Jess Ellwood, Richard Bradbeer, Matt Dixon, Muinos and Didirri Peters, creating a musical environment that feels immediate, organic and alive. The arrangements give Wise’s words room to resonate while retaining the energy and unpredictability of a band playing together in a room. It is a fitting sound for an album concerned with emotional movement; nothing is entirely fixed, and nothing remains untouched by what comes before it.
At the center of ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ is an artist willing to look directly at the contradictions that accompany change. Wise writes about the moments when love becomes complicated, when distance reshapes relationships, when identity feels less certain than it once did, and when the process of becoming someone new can initially feel much more like falling apart. Yet beneath the ache is a sense of possibility. The album acknowledges the beauty that exists in the uncomfortable spaces between who we were and who we are becoming.
‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ is unique in that it does not offer a polished narrative of overcoming adversity, nor does it attempt to turn every wound into a lesson. Instead, it embraces the ambiguity of living through experiences before we understand them. It is a record about being affected, changed and occasionally undone. It is about discovering that these states can coexist with joy, humor, desire and hope. On the heels of the album’s release, we sat down with Rowena to talk about the making of ‘Bad Things Feel Good*,’ the contradictions embedded in its title, and the personal and creative journey that shaped an album so willing to confront the beautiful, difficult and often bewildering business of being human.
Many thanks to Molly Bandelli and Lisa Gottheil at Grandstand for arranging and to Rowena for her candid and thoughtful responses.
James Broscheid: ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ seems to occupy the uncomfortable space between discovering that something is hurting you and discovering that letting it go might hurt even more. What did making this album teach you about the difference between pain that is telling you something important and pain that you simply need to survive?
Rowena Wise: I remember writing ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ in this really dislocated period of my life, touring constantly, coming home to Melbourne and somehow feeling more unsettled there than I did in hotel rooms or unfamiliar cities. I’d be lying awake in my own bed, or walking around the neighborhood after being away for weeks, and there was this strange feeling that the life I’d built still looked the same from the outside, but I didn’t quite fit inside it in the same way anymore.
I think making this record taught me that pain isn’t always a warning sign, and it isn’t always something noble that needs to be turned into a lesson either. When I wrote these songs, I kept wanting pain to give me a clean answer – if something hurt, surely that meant I should leave it, or fix it, or understand exactly what it was trying to tell me. But sometimes the pain was the thing telling me that something had to change, and sometimes it arrived because I had changed it. You can tell the truth, leave something you love, stop abandoning yourself, and still feel absolutely flattened by the grief of it.
That became a big part of the album for me. I stopped asking whether pain meant I was doing something wrong and started asking whether it was bringing me closer to myself or asking me to disappear. And I think a lot of growing up, for me at least, has been learning not to confuse the two.
JB: A recurring idea for me across the record is the dismantling of beliefs you once regarded as fundamental truths, particularly around love, identity and belonging. When you began writing these songs, were you consciously questioning those beliefs, or did the songwriting itself gradually expose how much of your understanding of yourself had been built around assumptions you no longer shared?
RW: I don’t think I began the record consciously trying to dismantle anything. A lot of the songs actually showed me, after the fact, how much of my understanding of love and belonging had been built from inherited ideas I hadn’t really examined. I’d write something and realize I was pushing against a belief I’d treated as instinct – that love had to look a certain way to be legitimate, that belonging meant attaching yourself firmly to a person or a place, that being a good person meant following a fairly fixed set of emotional rules. The songs became a way of noticing where those ideas had come from.
“Blood Ties” made that really obvious to me. Writing about a family struggling to respond to vulnerability showed me how behaviors can pass down so quietly that they start to look like personality. And then songs like “Unlearning of Love” were exposing inherited ideas from the other direction – through seeing people relate to each other in ways that didn’t fit the structures I’d grown up assuming were universal. So, songwriting became less about answering questions and more like turning the light on in a room I’d been living in for years. Suddenly I could see the furniture and the crap around me. I could see what I’d chosen, what I’d inherited, and what I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep.
JB: You have spoken about unlearning love, but I’m interested in what comes after the unlearning. Once you dismantle an old understanding of love, morality or identity, there is an enormous amount of uncertainty left behind. What have you begun building in that space, and does the new version feel more liberating or more frightening?
RW: When I wrote “Unlearning Of Love,” I was in this period where some of the relationships and connections in my life weren’t fitting neatly into the categories I’d grown up with. I was getting close to people in ways that felt intimate and meaningful, but I didn’t always know what those connections were supposed to become, and I started wondering whether love had to be named, claimed or made exclusive in order to be real.
That questioning started spilling into other parts of the record too – morality, identity, the idea of being a “good” person, and the stories we inherit about what a life is supposed to look like. Songs like “Bad Things Feel Good” and “No Angel” sit in that messier territory, where doing something truthful doesn’t necessarily mean nobody gets hurt, and where your sense of self can shift before you’ve worked out what the new version is. Songwriting became this little trapdoor underneath my certainty – it’s so sneaky like that.
I don’t think I’ve replaced the old rules with a shiny new philosophy. Unlearning wasn’t this clean, freeing thing; sometimes it felt like losing a piece of myself before I knew what was going to replace it. I’m more interested now in honesty, autonomy, curiosity and kindness, and in leaving enough room for people to remain themselves. That feels more liberating, but definitely more frightening too. There’s a lot of comfort in having a script, even if it doesn’t fit you very well.
JB: For me, the record refuses the comforting idea that difficult experiences necessarily become meaningful while we are living through them. Sometimes something simply hurts. How important was it for you to resist turning suffering into a redemption story, and what does genuine growth look like when there is no satisfying explanation for what happened?
RW: It was really important to me not to turn the record into a story where everything difficult eventually reveals itself to have been necessary. I think that idea can be comforting, but sometimes it also asks too much of suffering. There were things I went through while writing this album that I can understand differently now, but I still wouldn’t say I’m grateful they happened, or that they needed to happen in order for me to grow.
I remember having periods where I was so determined to find the lesson in what I was going through that I was almost trying to get ahead of the pain – like if I could explain it beautifully enough, maybe I could make it useful. Songwriting can encourage that instinct because you’re constantly turning experience into form. But eventually I became more interested in letting some things remain unresolved.
Genuine growth, for me, has become much less cinematic than I used to imagine it. It can be learning to live with a question you don’t get an answer to. It can be changing your behavior without needing a perfect explanation for why you behaved that way in the first place. It can be becoming softer, more honest, more responsible, while still admitting that something simply hurt and you wish it hadn’t. I think that’s why the album resists a redemption arc. I didn’t want to stand at the end of it and say, “And now I understand.” I wanted to say, “I’m still here, I’ve changed, and some of it remains unknowable.” That feels much closer to how life actually works.
JB: There is a fascinating tension between vulnerability and agency throughout the record. You are willing to expose moments of confusion, alienation and emotional unraveling, but you are also questioning the expectations, moral frameworks and relationships that helped create those feelings. Did writing the album change your understanding of where personal responsibility ends, and the influence of other people, family, culture and circumstance begins?
RW: I think writing this record made me much less interested in finding one consolidated place to put responsibility. There were definitely moments where I had behaved badly, avoided things, hurt people, or ignored what I knew, and I didn’t want to write around that. But I also became more aware of how much behavior is shaped by things that long predate the moment itself – family dynamics, ideas about love, fear, gender, culture, the ways we learn to keep the peace or make ourselves useful.
I think “Blood Ties” really opened that up for me. I started with a lot of frustration toward someone who seemed emotionally absent during a family crisis, and then the song slowly made me look further back at what he himself had inherited. It didn’t excuse the behavior, but it complicated it. That distinction became important to me. Understanding where something comes from isn’t the same as absolving yourself or anybody else. I think agency begins when you can finally see the pattern clearly enough to decide whether you’re going to keep repeating it.
JB: It struck me how your songwriting often shows rather than explains, leaving emotional space for the listener rather than dictating exactly what they should feel. Is that restraint partly an act of trust in the audience, and have you ever been surprised by a listener discovering a meaning in one of your songs that you had not consciously put there?
RW: Definitely. I think some of my favorite songs feel like someone has opened a door and then left the room, rather than standing there explaining what everything means. Songwriting is such a strange form because you’re putting all this very specific emotional information into something abstract – melody, imagery, rhythm, implication – and then somebody else comes along and finishes the meaning for you. I actually love that loss of control.
People have written to me about songs and attached them to experiences that were nowhere near what I was writing about, but the emotional architecture was somehow still right for them. That always feels kind of magical. There are also lines people single out that I barely remember deciding to write, and they’ve built an entire meaning around them. I don’t think the listener needs me hovering over the song saying, “This is the correct feeling.” I’d rather make the mechanics of the little puzzle and let them solve it however they need to.
JB: There is a potentially uncomfortable paradox in turning painful experiences into art: the thing that wounded you can eventually become one of the things that gives you purpose, connection or recognition. Did you ever find yourself questioning whether you were processing an experience for your own sake or unconsciously keeping it alive because it was becoming creatively useful?
RW: Yeah, I’ve definitely thought about that, and I think it’s one of the weirder ethical problems of making autobiographical work. There’s this uncomfortable moment where something awful happens and then, somewhere in the back of your mind, another part of you notices the language of it. I’ve caught myself doing that before – being genuinely devastated and then also thinking, almost against my will, “That’s a line.” It can feel grotesque.
I think the danger is when the artist part of you starts resisting recovery because the pain has become familiar material, or because suffering gives you a very clear identity. I don’t think I consciously kept anything alive for the songs, but I’ve definitely had to ask myself whether I was revisiting something because I still needed to understand it or because I knew how to make art from it.
These days I try to remember that the song doesn’t need the wound to remain open. You’re allowed to heal and lose access to that exact emotional temperature. That’s probably a good thing. I mean, it’s easier to write about stuff when you’ve already done a lot of the heavier processing. In that respect, the thing you want to express can become more of an object you can pick up and hold in your hand and examine.
JB: The album was recorded with a live band over a remarkably concentrated period, despite dealing with material that seems to demand enormous emotional precision. Did that immediacy change the psychology of the recording process? In other words, did having to make decisions quickly allow instincts to survive that might otherwise have been edited away?
RW: We had three full days and nights to cut the bed tracks of ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ at The Ratshack in Collingwood. We were recording the band live with the vocals for every take, so there just wasn’t time to endlessly interrogate every decision. In a weird way that was really freeing.
There was one song where we spent ages trying different grooves – I think three quite different versions – and I remember suddenly panicking that if one song was taking us this long, there was no way we were going to make the record we’d imagined in the time we had. But then Jess (Ellwood) shifted something in the drums, Richard (Bradbeer) found a different pocket on bass, I changed the way I sat inside the lyric, and suddenly it was there. That process became a little lesson for the whole record. We weren’t trying to perfect things so much as recognize when something became alive.
The short timeframe also meant I couldn’t go home and sing everything again fifty times. Some of the vocals have breaths or frayed notes or moments where my voice almost gives way. I probably would have edited some of those out if I’d had endless time, and now they’re some of my favorite parts. The raw human-ness of the album’s sound allows for truth in imperfection, which laces through the album’s very themes.
JB: I love those parts too. Despite the record’s incredible vulnerability, you wrote the songs with a band in mind and are now taking the album out with a full band, which represents a significant shift from the way you have previously presented your music. What happens to something deeply personal when it stops being solely yours and becomes a shared physical experience between musicians, performers and an audience?
RW: It changes them enormously. A song usually begins in this ridiculously private way – me alone with a guitar or singing quietly into my iPhone on an airplane while people around me are trying to sleep – trying to articulate something I can barely explain to myself. Hitting the studio, suddenly there are four bodies moving inside these songs.
I love hearing Jess or Richard or Matt (Dixon) respond to a song physically rather than intellectually. A drummer doesn’t necessarily need to know every piece of emotional context to understand where something needs to lift or pull back. That intuition adds meaning I couldn’t have written into the song myself.
Then there’s the audience, which changes it again. You can be singing something that came from a very specific person or moment in your life and look out and realize hundreds of people are attaching their own memories to it. At that point the song stops being a diary entry. It becomes this strange, shared object that everybody is carrying differently. I think that’s one of the things I love most about performing – something deeply personal becomes communal without becoming less intimate. Kind of ineffable.
JB: The idea of home appears to operate on several levels throughout the album: geographical home, emotional home, the feeling of belonging to other people, and the possibility of feeling at home within yourself. Do you think belonging is something we discover, something we construct, or something we have to continually negotiate?
RW: I think belonging is probably something we keep renegotiating. For a long time, I thought of home as something fairly fixed – a person, a house, a city, some stable point you could return to and recognize yourself inside. Touring complicated that for me. There were periods where I felt completely at ease in some unfamiliar town on the other side of the world, and then I’d come back to Melbourne and feel strangely displaced.
“Home In This World” came from that feeling. I remember lying awake one night looking at the sky and feeling incredibly small and alien to everything and then having this almost opposite thought that I was still made out of exactly the same stuff as all of it. I’m less convinced now that belonging is something you finally find. I think you make little versions of it, through friendship, ritual, place, attention – and sometimes they change. Maybe feeling at home in yourself is partly trusting that you can survive those changes without losing the whole idea of home.
JB: The record seems less interested in becoming certain about who you are than in becoming comfortable with uncertainty. Has that changed the way you think about identity itself? Is there freedom in accepting that the self may be something fluid that we never completely finish figuring out?
RW: I know it sounds disorienting, but I genuinely have never known who I am or felt at home in myself until very recently, and I used to experience changes in identity almost as evidence that I’d been dishonest before. Like, if I wanted something different now, then the version of me who wanted something else five years ago must have been wrong. I don’t really see it like that anymore. Finding a sense of home within means accommodating the endless inevitable changes with grace and resilience.
The self feels much more seasonal to me now. There are things that remain recognizably yours, but they rearrange themselves constantly depending on what you learn, who you love, where you live, what happens to you. I find that much less frightening than I used to.
There’s also something quite freeing in not having to defend an old version of yourself just because you once announced it confidently. You can change your mind. You can outgrow a belief. You can discover that something you thought was a permanent feature of your personality was actually a coping mechanism or an inheritance.
I don’t think identity becoming fluid means it becomes meaningless. It just means it’s alive.
JB: There is humor and irony underneath some of the album’s darker ideas, particularly in the tension between the title and its asterisk. How important is humor to you when confronting emotionally serious material, and do you see it as a form of emotional distance, a survival mechanism, or another way of telling the truth?
RW: A little bit of humor is really important to me, probably because I find total solemnity slightly suspicious. The album title is a good example. I remember writing “Bad Things Feel Good” on a page and feeling like it was too blunt, sounding so dramatic and morally certain. When I added the tiny asterisk it was basically saying, “Well, obviously this statement comes with about ten thousand caveats!” That makes me smile.
I think humor can be a survival mechanism. It’s also a way of being accurate, because even in really painful periods, life keeps being ridiculous. You’re having an existential crisis and then your parking expires. You’re heartbroken and somebody sends you an incredibly stupid meme and you laugh. Those things don’t diminish the seriousness of what’s happening; they’re part of it.
I like art that lets those tonal collisions exist. Darkness without any humor can sometimes become less truthful to me, because being human is so absurd alongside being devastating.
JB: You mentioned it earlier that the musicians around you brought a very different physical dimension to these songs than the intimacy of the writing might initially suggest. What did you learn about your own songs when you heard other musicians interpret them rather than simply hearing them as they existed inside your head?
RW: When recording ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ I learned that the emotional center of the songs weren’t always where I thought they were, and I think a big part of that comes from the trust I have with my producer Robert Muinos and the band. Rob produced my first album ‘Senseless Acts of Beauty’ (Beloved Recordings / Dalliance Recordings, 2024) as well, and we worked with the same core session players on that record, so by the time we made this there was already this shared language between us all. I trust Rob deeply with my art, which means I can bring in something quite fragile or half-formed and know he isn’t going to crowd it or force it into a shape that doesn’t belong to it.
Rob and the band are very good at recognizing when a song needs more, but maybe even better at recognizing when it needs less. There were moments where the obvious move would have been to make something bigger or more dramatic, and instead Rob would encourage everyone to leave space around it. Because the band had played together before, there was a lot of intuition in the room too – Jess, Richard and Matt knew how to listen around the lyric rather than just play over it. It was really humbling to work with them all, to experience how my songs can hold much more than the version I hear in my head when I write them alone. I think that’s one of the gifts of working with people you trust: the song stops being less yours and somehow becomes more fully itself.
JB: If your previous record was concerned with surviving particular emotional experiences, ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’ feels more interested in interrogating the beliefs and patterns underneath them. Do you feel that you have moved from asking how to get through difficult things toward asking why you were living according to certain ideas in the first place?
RW: I wrote ‘Senseless Acts of Beauty’ when I was much more interested in the immediate emotional weather of things – heartbreak, loss, trying to rebuild yourself after something had happened.
By the time I was writing ‘Bad Things Feel Good*’, I found myself asking more annoying questions. Why did I think love was supposed to look like this? Why did I believe being good meant behaving in that particular way? Why did certain family dynamics feel normal until suddenly they didn’t? Who actually taught me which desires were acceptable and which ones should make me ashamed? That shift made the writing less tidy because once you start pulling at those threads, there isn’t always a satisfying answer underneath them.
I think I moved from asking, “How do I survive this?” to asking, “What made this feel inevitable in the first place?” That’s a much more destabilizing question, but probably a more useful one.
JB: By the end of this album, there is no neat declaration that everything has been figured out, and maybe that is the point. There is an intriguing philosophical idea underneath the album that perhaps peace does not come from finally understanding yourself, but from becoming comfortable with the fact that you may never completely understand yourself. Has that changed the way you think about adulthood? In other words, what would you say you are still in the process of becoming?
RW: I used to imagine adulthood as this gradual accumulation of certainty. You’d get older and become more yourself, know what you wanted, understand your patterns, make better decisions, and eventually arrive at some stable little version of wisdom. That has not really been my experience.
If anything, getting older has made me more aware of how much I don’t understand, but I think I’m less frightened by that now. I’m not as desperate to resolve every contradiction immediately or turn every difficult period into a neat lesson. I can change my mind without feeling like it invalidates the person I was before, and I can admit that I don’t know what something means yet. Strangely, that feels more adult to me than certainty ever did.
I think I’m still becoming someone who can belong to herself without becoming closed off, someone who can love people deeply without disappearing into them, someone who can stay soft without being completely governed by other people’s needs or expectations. I’m also trying to become more curious about the versions of myself I haven’t met yet, rather than treating change like some kind of failure of consistency.
Maybe adulthood isn’t about finally understanding yourself. Maybe it’s more about developing enough trust in yourself that you can survive not knowing, and enough compassion for your past selves that you don’t need to keep putting them on trial. I like the idea that we never really arrive, that we just get a little better at travelling with ourselves.
Upcoming Tour Dates
2026
September 24: Kerikeri, New Zealand – Turner Centre
September 25: Auckland, New Zealand – Old Folks Ass, Newton, Auckland
September 26: Raglan, New Zealand – The Yard Raglan
September 27: Oakura, New Zealand – Dawn
October 1: Christchurch, New Zealand – Space Academy
October 3: Wellington, New Zealand – Vogelmorn Upstairs
October 15: Brunswick, VIC – Howler
October 16: Castlemaine, VIC – Bridge Hotel
October 23: Newtown, NSW – The Vanguard
October 24: Thirroul, NSW – Thirroul Railway Institute Hall
October 29: Fortitude Valley, QLD – Black Bear Lodge
October 30: Sunshine Coast, QLD – Mapleton Public House
November 7: Adelaide, SA – Grace Emily Hotel
November 13: Hobart, TAS – Altar Bar
November 20: North Fremantle, WA – Mojo’s Bar
November 22: Margaret River, WA – The River Hotel
2027
March 4: London, UK – MOTH Club
March 5: Bristol, UK – The Louisiana
Mar 6: Birmingham, UK – Sunflower Lounge
March 9: Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK – Cluny 2
March 10: Glasgow, UK – The Glad Cafe Cic
March 11: Leeds, UK – Headrow House
March 12: Norwich, UK – Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom
March 13: Brighton, UK – The Green Door Store
March 14: Manchester, UK – The Abbey
For more information, please visit:
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