Since launching his solo debut with ‘It’s All In My Head’ in June, Noah Hill (Parcels) today announces his debut album Ok ok now, due Sep 4 via Because Music. Marking the news comes his second single and music video, ‘Bye Baby’. LISTEN HERE + PRE-SAVE/ORDER LP HERE.

“I’d had these chords for a long time,” Noah shares of today’s new single ‘Bye Baby’. “When it came time to make the record, part of the chorus came to me, and it felt completely in line with what the album was about, but in a way I hadn’t said yet. The song is about a kind of resigned, slightly desperate acceptance that the relationship is over. There’s still a part of him trying to hold on, to convince her to come back, but that slowly turns into frustration as he realises she’s already moving on. It moves between intimacy and distance, hope and then a kind of passive-aggressive resignation. That feeling of, “have it your way… if that’s what you want.” That emotive push and pull is rendered visually through ‘Bye Baby’s music video by Cai Leplaw, where two partners are in the throes of moving on and the idiosyncrasies that make the day-to-day extraordinary when spent with the one you love most.

Noah Hill, best known as one-fifth of acclaimed Australian band Parcels, has stepped into an all-new creative lane with his debut album, Ok ok now. After years within a collaborative framework, Hill has found a home in folk and acoustic pop in the spirit of Andy Shauf and Unknown Mortal Orchestra, shaped by a period of life he is clearly still making sense of. He continues, “Having grown up playing folk and acoustic pop music, I started to miss the immediacy and quiet honesty of it, and gradually found my way back to these songs. When I did, it felt instinctive and right. Over time, it became clear this was the most honest place I could begin as a solo artist. Most of the songs were written over many years, on back porches at home, or in quiet hotel rooms. Some are nearly ten years old, others more recent. Together they trace a period of my life shaped by a first great love and its ending.”

Ok ok now, is not a typical record of heartbreak. The non-linear concept album tells a patchwork story of the breakdown of a relationship that reflects Noah’s fragmentary, non-linear experience. Once the dust is settled, with possessions divided up and goodbyes said, what comes to those in mourning are fragments: good times sitting next to bad times; snatches of the past, hitting you all at once, perpetually out of order. Melodic and disarmingly intimate, euphoria sits side by side with bittersweet tragedy. “I realised mid-way through writing the album that the only songs I could write were about this one relationship. No matter what I tried to write, I realised that in the end, they were always about her,” Hill reveals.

Noah extrapolates a lifetime’s trove of experience, with vignettes from the bleary-eyed eighteen-year-old in the thick of a first great love, to the emotionally mature young man basking in the strength to end something so intoxicating and primal, yet fundamentally not right. Working as a one-man band on the album, Hill plays almost all of the instruments heard and mixes the record itself. What’s more is how Ok ok now has things to say that extend beyond romance. Considering how things are meant to work in theory, and how they actually work in practice, Ok ok now, suggests the disconnect of when we come into contact with the gap between life as we actually live it – the world we move through – and some different, deeper world.

At its heart, Ok ok now, is the sound of a musician singing their truth, line by line. Experience glimmers of the record at Noah Hill’s debut headline shows this week in Sydney and Melbourne, detailed below.