Noah Hill (Parcels) has today released his debut album Ok ok now, out now via Because Music. The record follows lead single ‘It’s All In My Head‘, and second single ‘Bye Baby‘ which arrived alongside a music video directed by Cai Leplaw. LISTEN HERE.

Hill didn’t set out to write a break-up record. His debut under his own name, after years as one-fifth of acclaimed Australian act Parcels, came to him almost by accident. “I realised mid-way through writing the album that the only songs I could write were about this one relationship,” he says. “No matter what I tried to write, in the end they were always about her.”

But Ok ok now isn’t a typical record of heartbreak. It’s a non-linear concept album, telling the patchwork story of a relationship that was itself non-linear — stopping and starting, existing in hyper-intense month-long blocks followed by long periods of total separation. What’s left, once the dust settles and goodbyes are said, are fragments: good times sitting next to bad ones, memories arriving out of order.

‘Bye Baby’ captures that push and pull most directly. “The song is about a kind of resigned, slightly desperate acceptance that the relationship is over,” Hill explains. “There’s still a part of him trying to hold on, but that slowly turns into frustration as he realises she’s already moving on.” The accompanying video, following two partners moving on from each other, mirrors that tension between intimacy and distance — the everyday moments that become extraordinary with the person you love.

Fans of Hill’s work with Parcels will recognise his layered compositional style and his knack for melody — these are catchy songs that get into your head on one listen. But Ok ok now is a departure too: more melancholic, more contemplative, and built from songs written across a startlingly wide timeframe. “Some of the songs are so old,” Hill says. “‘Sympathise’ was something I wrote when I was eighteen. There are so many different time frames across the record, so many different styles — but together, they tell the right story.”

Returning to the folk and acoustic pop of his childhood, in the spirit of Andy Shauf and Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Hill found what he calls the most honest starting point for his solo work. Most of the songs were written over many years — on back porches at home, or in quiet hotel rooms — with some nearly a decade old and others much more recent, together tracing a period of his life shaped by a first great love and its ending.

The album opens with ‘Once In A Lifetime’, written at Hill’s apartment in Berlin during a period of doubt and uncertainty, and closes with ‘Like You Do’, a song about the fresh excitement of love’s beginning. Between those two poles, Hill favours plain, direct language over metaphor, giving the record disarmingly simple lines: “The grief hurts more when you’re to blame,” he sings on ‘Sympathise’.

Working largely as a one-man band, Hill plays almost all the instruments himself and mixes the record too. ‘Heaven‘, which began life as a dance track, is rich with feeling; ‘Read Your Mind’ layers melodies into something both euphoric and bittersweet; and ‘Love You Now’ sits on the knife’s edge between heartbreak and joy, built around the realisation that clarity often only comes in hindsight.

Beyond romance, Ok ok now is ultimately about the gap between how things are meant to work and how they actually do. “It’s the sense sometimes that this world isn’t the real one,” Hill says. “That the physical stuff, the stuff we interact with, isn’t everything.” It’s a deeply personal record — and when Hill played it to the people who know him best, their feedback was unanimous: this album couldn’t be more him.