On the Rise
Tulliah

“When I was younger I was a lot more confident,” laughs Tulliah from the other side of the world. “You just have no fear at all, you don’t really care what anybody thinks.” Growing up south of Melbourne on the Mornington Peninsula, from year one she was called up in school assemblies to sing “Happy Birthday” for her classmates. Fifteen years and she’s releasing her debut EP, Fre$h Hugs, a collection of songs that play out like diary entries. They’re intimate, vulnerable and warmly emotional. But even though she started early, Tulliah’s evolution as an artist wasn’t quite so straightforward.

“Back then I didn’t think anything of it,” she shrugs. She took singing lessons, and learnt the piano and guitar, but as she got older she felt less comfortable sharing her talent in public. “It wasn’t cool in the younger years of high school. I didn’t want anyone to know that I sang,” she smiles.

But things changed in year ten when Tulliah broke her ankle horse riding. Her singing teacher had encouraged her to try songwriting, and with her new found free time she began to embrace the practice. “Sitting around all day, I just started writing a lot more,” she explains. “Not being able to do anything, I just observed everyone.”

The first track she recorded was “Company”, a heartrending slick pop ballad. She uploaded the song to Australian radio station Triple J’s Unearthed competition, getting through to the final. “Since I was still in high school, it was the perfect opportunity,” she smiles. “I was lucky to be one of the five finalists, and that just gave me more exposure.”

That exposure led to offers of live shows, and Tulliah found herself supporting the likes of GRAACE and Amy Shark along the East coast. “I was supporting Amy Shark in New South Wales, and then I had to get back the next morning at 8.30 for my math exam,” she laughs. “It was so much fun! Though I did fail my math exam.”

After graduating high school, Tulliah went on tour for two months supporting Conrad Sewell around Australia. “That was a really good experience, just to have that long period of time where you’re touring,” she says. “It was so tiring, but it was really good.”

However, the end of the tour coincided with the start of something much bigger. “The last show was on March 13th, that was pretty much the last show anywhere,” she explains. “Then the next day in the airport, it was just so dead. It was so quiet, it felt eerie. We’d heard about covid but we just thought it would be fine. But then it got really real.”

Tulliah had already begun recording her debut EP with producer Dean Tuza, known for his work with the likes of Stella Donnelly and The Reubens. As the first lockdown began to ease, the two found a process for continuing to work together. “I’d just sleep on the studio floor rather than going back and forth between sessions. It’s just less of a risk that I’d get covid, to just stay in one spot,” she explains. “So Dean would just go home, which was a two minute drive from the studio, then he’d come back in the morning and we’d just work away. It was kind of like a mini holiday, actually, just sleeping in the studio. I packed meals and all I had was stir fry and beans, everyday. Literally every morning I’d just spray the place down with my perfume before Dean came in!”

Some of the tracks that Tulliah was bringing to the sessions were over two years old. Much like forgotten diary entries, she revisited them with distance and a little hesitance. “They weren’t bad songs, I didn’t despise them,” she explains. “We flipped a lot of them upside down and so my love for them was reignited. It felt like they were new in a way because when I first wrote them it was just me on a voice memo. It gives you space to just completely grow and add whatever you want to them, because they are so stripped back, it’s just building layers.”

On Fre$h Hugs, Tulliah shares her most intimate insecurities and emotions with a juxtaposed maturity and youthful naivety. EP opener “Just My Type (A Little Bit Lonely)” is all tender narrative, clashing breezy melodies with somber intimacy. The production is pop, but elegant and subtle. On “Take It Off Now Boy”, she’s almost clinical in her delivery, although her words are heaped with sentiment. While EP highlight “Okay” offers a deep, emotional delivery carried by soft strikes of strings, creating a soundtrack that could be synced to a montage of teenage heartache.

The EP’s narrative is helped along with short samples, the first being “Teenagers”, a kitsch clip of British socialite Lady Lewisham, Princess Diana’s Stepmother, found by Tulliah and Tuza during a YouTube binge. “We just thought, let’s try putting that at the front of the song, and it just worked perfectly. It was just a cool intro, especially because she was talking about teenagers and all my songs are written from that perspective. It just felt so right and we couldn’t part with it.”

The music breaks again with “Hey My Friend”, a monologue from Tulliah on the track’s meaning and importance. “That’s the song on the EP that gets me. It just pulls at my heartstrings. It’s a very vulnerable one that I wrote about a friend who was going through a hard time, and you just don’t want to see your friend hurting,” she explains. “Originally I wasn’t going to have it on there because it’s so vulnerable, it’s really scary, and then a day before the deadline I was speaking to my friend who gave me the inspiration and she was like, ‘Nah, do it. It could help someone’. I guess the more vulnerable you are the more people will relate to you.”

Relatability should be the last of Tulliah’s concerns. If you’ve been through adolescence, you’ll understand the need for Fre$h Hugs.