Naarm/Melbourne singer-songwriter Grace Robinson releases her debut solo single ‘harder than you think’ today – a sharp, self-aware indie-rock track about the absurdity of trying to win at your own recovery. LISTEN HERE. WATCH HERE.

Robinson has spent the better part of a decade doing everything except making music as herself: booking national tours, directing an 80-voice choir, undergoing 5 years of jazz voice training at the VCA, co-fronting an electronic pop group, and working as the youngest booking agent at one of Australia’s most respected agencies. She was very good at all of it. She was also burning out.

‘harder than you think’ is the sound of someone who finally sat down. Written in the wake of a period of genuine personal upheaval – anxiety, burnout, diagnosis – the song doesn’t wallow. It does something funnier and more interesting: it catches Robinson in the act of trying to ace her own recovery.

“I wrote this song when I finally started to feel a little better and recover from a pretty epic burnout, but realised I was approaching healing like it was a test I could win,” she says. “I wanted to get an A+ in recovery, which unfortunately completely defeats the purpose of recovering from burnout. The song kind of pokes fun at that mindset. You can’t be ‘the best’ at healing (apparently). It takes time, and it’s never neat or easy.”

The song lands somewhere between Sharon Van Etten’s emotional precision and the dry self-awareness of early Julia Jacklin: indie-rock that doesn’t mistake openness for softness. Robinson is funny about difficult things — genuinely, clunkily funny, not just ‘relatable’ — specific where it counts, and not particularly interested in making vulnerability feel comfortable. It’s a sharp entry point into a songwriter who has been hiding in plain sight.

WATCH: ‘harder than you think’ (Official Music Video)

The accompanying video, directed by Hugo Kohler, known for his camcorder aesthetic and witty, irreverent music videos, brings the song’s central metaphor to life with characteristically silly precision. Shot in a single day in Royal Park with a crew of three, the clip drops Robinson into a surreal, Teletubbies-tinged world built around the “Guitar Hero” concept at the song’s core: the idea of playing through life as though it were a game you could win. Robinson performs badly at juggling, loses her dog on a walk, and shreds heroically on a toy plastic guitar — all while a doppelgänger of herself stands by, offering a running commentary of criticism. It’s messy, self-deprecating, and completely earnest: a visual that earns its laughs without undercutting the point.

Robinson’s CV reads like a music industry trivia question: she co-wrote on an ARIA-nominated jazz record at nineteen, before most people knew her name, then performed at Dark Mofo before releasing a single note of solo material, and has toured with Middle Kids while technically still being an unsigned booking agent. Before going solo, she spent years as lead vocalist of Naarm-based electro-soul outfit Empress, fronting a project that punched well above its weight, played alongside Hiatus Kaiyote and Sampa The Great, headlined The Night Cat to 450 people, and earned slots at Beyond the Valley,Strawberry Fields, and Dark Mofo. It was a genuine career, built on genuine talent. But it was, in some important way, still someone else’s story to tell. Now for the first time, she’s telling her own, and she’ll be the first to admit, she’s absolutely bricking it.