Lucky’s first project sounds like the product of a much more established musician. Atop grungy, fuzzy guitars her disarming voice echoes American contemporaries like Momma and Laveda so well that I couldn’t fathom she was from rural Victoria. In fact, cuts like ‘Lady Beetle’ could easily sit alongside cuts from Welcome to My Blue Sky.

Opening track ‘Adored’ comes out swinging with the catchiest hook on the entire project—“You’re adored, but I think you’re bored” is a simple line at face value but so well encapsulates an unrequited love that’s “setting me up to be let down”. The song sets up the musical palette we’ll be hearing across the entire project, with tight drumming, bruising guitar, and bass lines you can actually hear (take note fellow indie rock artists!)

The guitar work across Biting Heels is consistently great but the more experimental tracks like ‘Houston’, which introduces this massively distorted tremolo tone, are by far the most memorable. My personal favourite, ‘Clover’, lets the lead guitar shine with a killer hook that the vocals work around — it’s a relatively structureless track meaning the guitar acts more like a chorus than the repeated refrain “What about that clover?” 

No song overstays its welcome in this project, with most sitting under the three-minute mark. Lucky is an upfront songwriter, meaning no song is left with any loose ends—each track gets her message across in a neat package. Tracks like ‘Hide and Seek’ and ‘Too Tied’ don’t offer much lyrically outside of their choruses, but still bring the noise and round out the EP nicely.

Lucky has pulled off something truly remarkable and rare by creating a debut EP that sounds absolutely nothing like a debut. Biting Heels is an assured and consistent effort that absolutely rocks and sets up the Melbourne-based songwriter for a breakout year.

Listen to Biting Heels by Lucky on streaming services now. She’s taking the EP on tour in June – more details here.