Local Woman, Photograph supplied
Kalyani Ellis’ debut album as Local Woman can be summed up by a line from the song “Pop Star.” “Just be yourself,” the former Willow Beats member and retired DJ sings, “because everyone else is taken.”
The album, titled 27, is an act of self-actualisation – and one that acknowledges that we become who we are by virtue of our relationships.
Kalyani dedicates the album to her uncle and Willow Beats bandmate, the late Narayana Johnson, a composer and producer who worked under the name River Boy and who tragically passed away on the eve of the album’s release.
“You taught me how to fly,” Kalyani writes in the album liner notes. And fly she does: 27 is one of the most passionate and unreserved pop records in recent memory. Its nine songs drip with feeling as Kalyani explores fluid self-perception and volatile relationships. Fear is absent.
Kalyani spent the entirety of her teen years playing in Willow Beats. The duo released a string of EPs and one full-length album, 2017’s Be Kind to Yourself, and toured non-stop, performing at events such as Splendour in the Grass, Listen Out, WOMADelaide and Falls Festival.
But when the band went on hiatus in 2018, Kalyani stepped away from songwriting to focus on DJing. She became a fixture of the Naarm club scene, recorded mixes for triple j and NLV Records, and appeared at Pitch Music & Arts, Mode Festival and Boiler Room.
Kalyani’s DJ exploits culminated in the 2023 mixtape, Local Woman, an excited, technically deft, and occasionally dreamy collection of edits of tracks by Lady Gaga, Jessica Mauboy, Vv Pete and Silverchair.
But as she began to chafe against the creative constraints of DJing, Kalyani found herself longing for a freer form of expression. 27 is the result of this creative hunger. The album, which revolves around keys and Kalyani’s unvarnished voice, and features contributions from her partner, the boundaryless producer e fishpool, forgoes pop convention in the name of creating a new pop paradigm.
“Local Woman is almost like a superhero, my alternate pop superhero,” Kalyani says.
A deluxe edition of 27 is now available on CD and digitally. Find that here.
Check Check: What brought you back to songwriting after working as a DJ?
Kalyani: DJing does feel like a blip in the grand scheme of my life and my journey as a songwriter. I reached the limit of what I wanted to accomplish with it. I am a storyteller, I’m an artist, and I’ll always express myself, whether that’s through dancing or drawing or painting or talking to people.
So, DJing was no longer creatively fulfilling?
Yeah. I am always driven to push myself, and it was the same with DJing. Even though I entered into a somewhat commercial circuit with it, my practice was still very experimental, and that was a really big friction. Everyone was wanting something from me that I was unwilling to provide. The contexts in which I was being booked to play weren’t really aligning with what my practice was, which is what really drove me to release Local Woman.
“Our voices need to be heard as songwriters. We need to be making music rather than facilitating dancefloors.”
That’s your DJ-era mixtape.
It was a really big undertaking. The more commercial DJing I was doing financed me to buy the equipment that I needed to do that project. But the project was me taking my practice back into my hands and writing my own story about what my practice is and what can be achieved through DJing.
I do believe DJing can be this really expansive artform, but I feel like we’ve reached saturation at this point. And it hurts my heart to see that a lot of artists with politicised identities get really encouraged to work in this DJing sphere. I feel like our voices need to be heard as songwriters. We need to be making music rather than facilitating dancefloors.
So, that’s why I killed Kalyani, which was my DJ alias. I murdered her so I could regrow.
27 is a deeply personal record. It sounds like you were motivated to make something that represented your subjectivity rather than worrying about it being accessible. Was that the aim?
Yeah. I am deeply influenced by my grandfather, Wally Johnson. He’s always been my hero as a songwriter. He wrote songs that really captured a moment in time and where he was and who he was and just little quirks of everyday life.
He wrote “Home Among the Gum Trees,” right?
He did. But he has a lot of different songs that aren’t known and that are beautiful. There’s a collection of tapes that’s been in the attic at my family home since I was little. In my early 20s, I digitised them and I listened to those, and he has really shaped my approach.
I am a songwriter in the most traditional sense of what a songwriter is, and I take that very seriously. So, being honest and telling a real story, that’s where I come from. So I guess it was never really a choice as much as a responsibility.
The album, for me, revolves around “Pop Song” and “Pop Star.” Neither is a conventional pop song. Were you envisioning a more adventurous style of songwriting that could be regarded as pop?
For me, Local Woman was like creating my own pop paradigm. Local Woman is aspiring to be yourself, as much of yourself as you possibly can be. And that’s being like the people where you’re from, being like your family, being like the place that you’re from, understanding it, caring about the waterways, caring about the mountains and plants and animals, and caring about culture.
That’s who Local Woman aspires to be, but it’s still kind of within this pop backdrop because that’s something that we can all relate to and understand. It’s almost like a superhero, my alternate pop superhero.
“Local Woman is aspiring to be yourself, as much of yourself as you possibly can be.”
That’s what it sounds like – an iteration of pop music that is specific to you. The songs are also quite unpredictable.
Everything that happens, I want it to be like the last thing you would think or the craziest thing. I want everything to have that stomach-dropping moment. But it’s still really satisfying. It’s not just noise for the sake of it.
It sounds like you’re expressing yourself in a vulnerable way. Do you feel exposed at all, with the way you use your voice on 27 and the content of your lyrics?
I’ve always had a really big audience of people judging me and watching me, so it doesn’t as much feel vulnerable as it feels like having control and telling my story. That feels great. It feels like I’m taking the power back.
I feel like I’m getting to show who I am by doing something that I really love and showing the parts of myself that are beautiful to me and the parts of my story and my family that are beautiful and special to me. It feels good.
You produced a lot of the album with your partner, Emily, who is also known as e fishpool. What is it like working together?
I met her two years ago and she really believed in me at a time when I was finding it hard to believe in myself and see myself as a songwriter. Literally the first time we hung out, we created “Pop Song” together. I just had it as a voice note and I hadn’t shared it with anyone and I shared it with her and she just loved it and it moved her.
She has the most amazing practice of anyone that I’ve ever known. Her music is this deep part of her everyday life. It’s like eating healthy, it’s like going for a jog – it’s just a part of her, and it’s not a product.
For me, being in the music industry from a young age, I had a lot of internalised ideas about what music needed to be, and a lot of them were really capitalistic and there was a lot of judgement and a lot of insecurity.
Emily really fostered my spirit and [fostered me] finding a new relationship with my music, and that has been so healing. I feel like I’ve been able to find the songwriter that I was when I was a little girl and I started writing songs.
“I feel like I’ve been able to find the songwriter that I was when I was a little girl and I started writing songs.”
In the album description, you say that you “risked life and limb to put 100% into making music again.” What do you mean by that?
I tried to go down a path after Willow Beats of working a nine-to-five. I wanted to be a “normal person”. I just wanted to have enough money to have stable housing and not be strapped, and it’s like, I dropped out of high school to do Willow Beats when I was 15. My brain isn’t really wired for a nine-to-five. I was so exhausted by the social element of having a day job that my creativity really suffered and I wasn’t writing songs.
It’s only since accepting that I do live on the margins as an artist – living in unconventional arrangements, moving around a lot – that I have been able to devote my energy towards my art. But I’m giving up the thing that a lot of my peers have prioritised, which is stability, building a nuclear family, creating this traditional future for yourself. But I look at people who have that and I know the people who are artistic spirits, their souls are suffering.
So, I am really peaceful with the path that I’m on, but it is really scary. And the hard part is that Narayana was a really big support for me. So with him being gone, that path has become more scary. He was meant to be there for the rest of my life.
But I’m also very blessed to have my partner, Emily [e fishpool], and my friend Alice [Skye]. I’m surrounded by people who believe in me and believe in my art. It’s only through that that any of this can happen – through the people around you believing in what you dream.
“I am really peaceful with the path that I’m on, but it is really scary.”
Listen to and purchase 27 by Local Woman here; follow Local Woman here.
This article was first published on July 16, 2025.
