Growing up in small towns was a blessing and a curse for rising alt-pop artist Yen Strange.
In an attempt to distance herself from cliques at school – where she struggled to fit in – she'd spend her lunch breaks hiding out in the music room. That was where the pieces started falling into place.
Yen had fostered a serious interest in music since she was seven. She'd studied piano and practiced singing along to songs on the radio in her dad's car, everything from P!nk to Missy Higgins. Singing lessons didn't work out for Yen; she didn’t want to sing the ‘proper way’. She’s been doing her own thing ever since.
Yen moved from her hometown of Moruya to the larger Wollongong at 16 and started playing in local bands, but found that the aspirations of her bandmates never quite seemed to sync up to her own. "Everyone around me was saying there aren't many opportunities.”
Spirals began as sporadic and then became more frequent, until she experienced a breakdown. "That was a hard few years going through stages of low self-worth and negative experiences with suppressive people," she says.
Despite the hurdles Yen kept working. But as the years stacked up, she started to wonder if she'd ever find her place. “Eventually I just gave up on music entirely. I was like, that's it. It's not for me."
She enrolled in university in an attempt to forge a new path – but it didn't stretch out in front of her in quite the way she'd imagined. Yen began to wonder where she'd be in three years: would she be happy? Would she still want to pursue music and wish she'd started sooner? She sat at her piano and began writing a song: Donnie Darko, her debut single.
She produced her own demo of the track, before showing it to Sydney producer Fletcher Matthews. Together, they spent a day reworking and refining its alt-pop/ trap elements. The pair collaborated on several of Yen’s early tracks, with later flourishes added by fellow musician and producer, Alice Ivy.
Now 21 and living in Sydney, she has well and truly escaped rural suburban life, but was shocked at how the events of 2020 yanked her back in time, to her early teen years growing up in Moruya.
"Clueless in Suburbia is me being very nostalgic and reminiscing on how I felt when I was younger," Yen says of the self-written and co-produced track on her debut EP. "Being in lockdown reminded me of when I was younger and I didn't get to do anything I wanted to do. I was getting flashbacks to being stuck in a spot where I had limitations."
Elsewhere on the EP, Tamagotchi is an ode to friendship and recalls the day when Yen reunited with a friend after COVID-19 lockdowns eased. Another collaboration with Matthews and Ivy, Go Away began with heavy, grunge intentions before the pair built it into a euphoric punk ballad.
The first single, Donnie Darko, introduces Yen Strange to new audiences. It captures her past experiences with depressive, mundane cycles and battling her inner demons in layers of first-person songwriting packaged in a reference to one of her favourite films.
"It's about battling that double personality, that separate part of yourself that tells you that you're not good enough, that you can't do anything," Yen says.
And it is testament that Yen Strange holds all the power and talent she needs, all on her own.