
(The Oriel Company) After years helping shape Parcels' signature sound, Noah Hill is fully stepping into his own. Today, he announces his debut solo album, Ok ok now, arriving September 4 via Because Music. With the announce he shares the album's second single, "Bye Baby" , an intimate meditation on the slow unraveling of a relationship.
"I'd had these chords for a long time," Noah shares of the 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 the song'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.
Best known as one-fifth of acclaimed Australian band Parcels, Noah Hill steps into a deeply personal new chapter with Ok ok now. After years creating within a collaborative band, Hill returns to the folk and acoustic pop that first shaped him, drawing inspiration from the intimate songwriting of Andy Shauf and Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
"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," Hill explains. "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."
Rather than telling a straightforward story of heartbreak, Ok ok now unfolds as a nonlinear collection of memories, capturing the emotional disorientation that follows the end of a relationship. Once the dust settles, what remains are fragments: moments of joy alongside pain, memories arriving unexpectedly and out of sequence. Across the album's melodic, understated arrangements, euphoria and grief exist side by side.
"I realised midway through writing the album that the only songs I could write were about this one relationship," Hill says. "No matter what I tried to write, I realised that in the end, they were always about her."
Performing as a one-man band, Hill played nearly every instrument across the record and mixed the album himself. While rooted in one relationship, Ok ok now ultimately reaches beyond romance, exploring the gap between how we imagine life should unfold and how it actually does. It's a meditation on memory, growth, and the quiet truths that only become clear in hindsight.
At its core, Ok ok now is the sound of an artist finding his own voice. Fans can experience the new material live at Noah Hill's debut headline shows in Sydney and Melbourne this week with debut solo shows in New York and LA in September.
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