Island Records Australia

A glacial coolness runs through Vera Blue’s music. Across an EP, debut album and a handful of spectacular, beloved singles, the Sydney-based singer and songwriter — real name Celia Pavey — has translated the pristine shimmer of the natural world into pop music, the resulting songs possessing the same rare, fragmentary beauty of frost on a winter’s morning. Pavey’s music has always embodied a hard-to-capture stillness, so gorgeously limpid as it is. Until now: a fire is lit at the heart of “Temper”, Pavey’s ecstatic, glorious first single of 2021. Hot-headed in all the best ways, it’s an anthem of defiance that translates the turbulence of new love into driving, 80s-inspired pop. “I don’t know whether it’s made up, but people always say redheads are a bit fiery, and that we have a bit of a short fuse,” Pavey says. “This song’s about grabbing hold of that emotion and trying to suppress it so you don’t scare your partner away. It makes me dance, but it’s also got that emotional edge.”

Featuring an ingratiating, driving bassline and piquant 80s-inspired handclaps, “Temper” runs at full-throttle from the get-go, a song whose forward motion reflects Pavey’s emotive lyrics. Written in February with songwriter Carla Whebe, a friend of Pavey’s, and producer Robby De Sa, the track quickly made sense as the introduction to a new era of Vera Blue, given its dynamic range and foregrounding of the electric guitar, an instrument Pavey has been inspired by over the past 12 months. After working on the song’s demo with Whebe and De Sa, Pavey brought the track to her longtime collaborators Andy and Tom Mak, with whom she wrote a bridge and added in hallmarks of the Vera Blue sound — the organic electronic sound that’s become her trademark over the past few years. Bringing together a handful of musicians Pavey was already close with, the song is something of a family affair; bringing the process full-circle was engineer Eric J Dubowsky, another longtime collaborator of Pavey’s, with whom she recorded her hit Flume collaboration “Rushing Back”.

Although “Temper” slips into an explosive, dancefloor-primed chorus, the song also features some of Pavey’s most emotionally nuanced lyrics yet: “Now it’s almost daily, questioning my personality / Starting to think that you hate me, do you? / Tell me, cause you’re testing out my temper.” The contrast is in tune with Pavey’s new outlook, which highlights the light and shade of the human experience with deft poeticism. “With the music that I’m making at the moment, I like having really crazy contrasts,” she says. In a first for Pavey, “Temper” was written not from her own perspective but from intuiting the feelings of those around her, and trying to write a song that spoke to her own feelings but not her own life. “It’s really interesting writing a song about what you’re not feeling at the time — it just flows because it’s almost like you’re out of body, so I found it quite enjoyable. Writing ‘Temper’ was about experimenting, and making me feel something different from music, which I love.”

“Temper”, then, is an encapsulation of Vera Blue to this point: a song that pushes a multi-platinum, ARIA nominated and APRA Award winning into an entirely new, and totally thrilling, realm. It’s a study in contrasts that feels satisfyingly holistic, and is a strong bellwether for just how far the Vera Blue universe can expand. Sparkling and invigoratingly hot-blooded, it might be Pavey’s most clarified statement to date: “It feels fresh, fun and relatable, and I hope everyone likes it as much as I do!”

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