Critic’s pick: Grace Cummings, the singer with one of Australia’s most powerful voices

Elemental is the best way to describe the voice of Grace Cummings. It appears to spring from a deep well connecting her diaphragm to the massive tectonic plates below, with gravelly edges concealing its true power. And on her new album, Ramona, Cummings lets that instrument rip like never before, opening up new layers of vulnerability. Her voice is deafening in its emotional openness.

Cummings has the worn edges of Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett; sonically some songs on Ramona approach the country-soul-swing of Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman. But where that song was a chipper anthem of empowerment, Cummings’ chipper is the kind that shreds dead logs (and exes) into dust: she is righteous and indignant, to the point of eviscerating anything in her path.

Over blaring brass on Everybody’s Somebody, Cummings excoriates a (one assumes former) romantic partner with a delivery approximating a withering eye roll:

Smoke in your room till the sun rises
And tell yourself that you’re number one
And maybe write a letter to your son,
If you miss him so much?

Cummings might yearn, or express longing, but the overwhelming sense is that those emotions don’t come at the expense of her own agency or power.

Essentially, it sounds like she doesn’t take shit from anybody. When Cummings’ voice breaks through the clouds one “autumn day” on Ramona opener Something Going Round, its ragged edges suggest a bolt of lightning sent to splinter the stump of an old relationship.

Following her first two albums, Refuge Cove and Storm Queen, Ramona is Cummings’ most accomplished yet, adorning her voice’s devastating force with a deep, velveteen richness. It feels massive in many ways: a tidal wave of emotion, thick instrumentation and operatic bombast.

Storm Queen, funded through a city of Melbourne-run Covid relief program and nominated for the Australian music prize in 2022, had its show-stopping moments, including opener Ave Maria, but its sparseness didn’t quite articulate the shock wave Cummings can deliver live. That’s arguably impossible on record, but Ramona’s rich production embodies that grandeur and this time cut from a different cloth. Having self-produced her first two albums, Cummings enlisted Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty, Margo Price) to record the luxurious arrangements on Ramona. Those softer edges only serve to accentuate the increasingly raw, jagged crags that silhouette Cummings’ voice.

While she plays in a desert sandbox of Americana, blues and gospel traditions, her voice doesn’t fall into the trap of affected accents or cultural mimicry that some Australian acts working in similar genres fall into. It feels from here, this place, her place. All of which is cemented by her deft, no-nonsense, crunchy guitar playing.

Elsewhere in 21st-century pop, many vocalists the world over have chosen to adopt a mass-appeal, borderless accent that (at its most tolerable) approximates something Scandinavian or (at its least) a squirrel singing through acorn-stuffed cheeks. Cummings, on the other hand, clings to each syllable with white-knuckle intensity. It’s refreshing to hear someone commit to completing the sound of each consonant.

Ramona is a gorgeous, soulful record, one worth catching live when Cummings tours later this year. When I first saw her play at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in 2021, I described the performance as “powerful enough to pound granite into dust”. A more recent show in February made it clear those gifts are only intensifying.

When it came time to sing the new album’s title track, Cummings put down her guitar to hammer her breastplate with one fist. Eyes fixated beyond the crowd, it felt like the back wall of the venue was about to have a hole burned through it, pedestrians on the other side be damned. It’s probably safer to be in the venue where she can see you.

For more: Ramona is out now. Cummings is touring the US and Europe in May and June.

This month Guardian Australia also listened to …

Jebediah – Oiks (12 April)

Australia’s rock mainstays are back for their first album in 13 years. “It was very much taking a risk on our chemistry still being there,” frontman Kevin Mitchell told us in our Headline Act interview this month.

Gauci – Growing Pains (4 April)

Not since Lorde’s debut has coming of age sounded this effervescent. Every track from this Sydney trio’s new mixtape could soundtrack the closing credits of a teen film, bulging with the delight and dolour of burgeoning adulthood.

1300 – George (17 April)

More boundless energy from the Korean-Australian hip-hop collective – though three years on from their explosive break-out, the mood has soured slightly. There’s a newfound snarl to these tracks as they reckon with the woes of the world – and the industry.

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love (12 April)

Ribeiro’s greatest quality is her voice: diaphanous and transportive, able to convey vast oceans of grief and injury – as she does on this album’s title single, centred around her relationship to a missing person’s case and its aftershocks in present day.

Hydra Fashion Week – Serpent Season One (4 April)

Charlie Teitelbaum used to play in beloved trio Huntly; now he might be Australia’s campest new showman as leader of Hydra Fashion Week, whose debut album is winkingly effete and intentionally esoteric: a completely bonkers set of heart attacks indebted to Jarvis Cocker and David Byrne.