A pillar of Melbourne’s music and queer communities, Cash Savage and her colossal band The Last Drinks launch their new album So This Is Love (with special guests Gut Health)

Savage’s band The Last Drinks are a powerhouse of fierce and brooding energy, every bit as committed to her songs and message. Every performance by this band is as epic as it is honest, raw and human. Yet the theme of fragility runs through this new album like a faultline. Fragile mental health, a fragile economy, the fragility of the environment and our personal relationships, all on the brink of collapse, threatening to crack under pressure; this is the fraught territory So This Is Love inhabits, and fearlessly explores. The opening three songs of the album flow into each other with increasing urgency, declaring the gravity of the situation.

True to the album title, Cash Savage delves deep and with ferocious honesty into what love means to her, as a queer woman coming to terms with a marriage breakup and a mental breakdown. "All love will end, all love will change form", Cash observes. "If you experience deep love, you don’t judge it as a failure if it doesn’t last. You can love someone after they die, you can love someone in a different way." Romantic love, family love, the bonds of friendship, self-love and the affectionate intimacy of spending the night with someone are some of the forms that love takes, as the stories of So This Is Love unfold.

The shattering experience of depression is at the raw and tender heart of this album. Cash reflects on the bleak daily battles of mental health, and the struggles of a songwriter to be creative and "productive" amidst a backdrop of turmoil and despair. "I had to come to terms with the reality of mental fragility", Cash recalls, "feeling the pressure to be there for my family, to create music and exist as I did before, and not coping at all. Depression is a human experience, but having not experienced it before, I had no idea how it infiltrates everything – your relationships, yourself worth, your capacity to work and create. It’s definitely given me a new level of understanding about mental health and compassion for what people go through."

"One of the most powerful bands in the country… you won’t hear much that’s better than this."
- The Guardian

"A fucking spectacular live phenomenon"
- Beat Magazine

TIMES:
Doors - 7pm
Support (Gut Health) - 8pm
Headline (Cash Savage and the Last Drinks) - 9pm

This event takes place on Wadawurrung Country. Minerva Ballaarat acknowledges the Wadawurrung People of the Kulin Nation as the first inhabitants and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we work, learn and create. Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.