Multi-instrumentalist Romy Church - known under his moniker e4444e - returns with his fourth full-length record Authentic Natural Tradition. The record might be Church’s most direct statement, with the cloudy arrangements of his previous record (I Spend All Day Drawing a Circle) cleared to make way for breathy vocals, bittersweet lyrics and delicate guitars and percussion.

On this album, Church’s reflections float to the surface of his tracks, clear-eyed and bracing. Lyrics are not buried deep into the mix, but slice through. Meanwhile, the album’s lyrics push against linearity, playing with the haphazard nature of dreams and the subconscious. Celestial forces, strange associations and juxtaposing images abound on Authentic Natural Tradition, but the record never feels lofty or out of grasp. Rather, Church’s abstract tales feel grounded, through their visceral emotions and invocations of the natural world.

Like I Spend All Day Drawing a Circle, Church recorded, performed and mixed the album by himself, with a few friends dropping by to add in live drums and guitar hooks. The title is a sly joke - Church wanting to put aside alternative tunings and revisit more simple chord hooks. He was also poking fun at himself. As he says, the album reflects the ‘tradition’ he’s created over his past four records, with Church becoming increasingly aware of his own fixations, themes and sounds. Yet, Authentic Natural Tradition sees Church expanding his palette like never before, with dips into psych-rock, ghostly techno and sprawling country.

Take lead single ‘Liberation’ where frenetic percussion, windy chords and elliptical lyrics come together to produce an ecstatic declaration of freedom, confusion and doubt. Church let's all these feelings sit together and mingle, exposing how the hope for transcendence comes with great emotions of fear and terror. The song is moreso about the striving and reaching for liberation, than the actual feeling of liberation itself. As Church sings: “Liberation hangs like silk just past the horizon.” The percussion was crafted through a happy accident: Church accidentally hitting his guitar and recording the sound. Liking its chaotic exultation, Church decided to hit his guitar a few more times, record it and then create a loop.

Album opener ‘Skink’ is a kind of lover’s lament, that takes the form of small, fragmented vignettes - strong windows, a skink coming around a wall, and a moment of seeing someone as they really are. An image, as Church sings, of life’s “lonely carousel.” Church says it was inspired by the “feeling of wind rushing over you while you sit still.” The song contains a similar gentle force - beginning with unaccompanied acoustic guitar that slowly builds with soft synths and xylophone. ‘Push the Dove’ is analogous, a dreamy patchwork of feelings and sounds, where weariness brings on elation, and elation transforms into a sturdy perspective. Church says it charts the “fluttery romantic feelings and hope, until it flips inward and turns into something more grounded and darker. There is a sense of standing on the shore, feeling as if you can see the whole world ahead of you.”

Other tracks indulge into the liminal space of dreams. ‘Fox’ is a haunting and minimalist electronic song, underpinned by slow bass guitar, which tunnels into the crepuscular and hidden. The song is about finding tenderness in dark feelings - still seeing the possibilities of light in the middle of anguish and mental fog. Church says the song was partly inspired by a dream he had where he was a fox, deep in a “groove in the ground. I could see the sun peaking out. Then I saw a fox run across a path I was on a few days later.” ‘Forward Upward’ has origins in another of Church’s dreams, and is a surreal collage of domestic life and reptilians. It feels like an ode to being untethered, as Church sings: “It’s a fallacy [that] things are solid.” The unhurried psych-rock bliss of ‘Crutch’ finds a way out through droney synths and swirling melodies, that captures the psychic resolve of not understanding, but knowing knowledge will come eventually. The first half of the track contains a repeated mantra: “What you reach for, this could be your crutch” until midway through, where the song cracks open, and makes way for acoustic guitars and imagery of a woman on a horse, somewhere in the desert. Like much of the record, the song is an expression of growing comfortable with uncertain emotions, and letting mysterious associations and instincts lead the way.

Authentic Natural Tradition continues e4444e’s prolific and expansive output, joining last year’s Soft Sighing Dusk I Never See You, I Spend All Day Drawing a Circle (2023), Autumnal Eve (2021) and Australian Music Prize-nominated Coldstream Road (2020), as well as a string of self-released EPs and stand-alone singles. Cited by The Guardian as “one of the best young artists in the country”, his work has been met with widespread acclaim from NME, Rolling Stone Australia, The Music, The Australian and Fashion Journal among others, with regular plays and praise across FBi Radio (Album of the Week x 4), 2SER (rotation), Triple R, 2SER and more. Live, e4444e has shared stages with Emma Russack, Godtet, thatboykwame and Body Type, among others, plus landed a coveted slot on innovative Gadigal land/Sydney venue, Phoenix Central Park’s Season III program.