On her first two albums as Geowulf, songwriter and musician Star Kendrick wrote witty, timeworn tales of love and heartbreak, dressing up modern millennial fables in the sounds of dreampop and indie-folk. Working with her friend and longtime collaborator Toma Banjanin, Kendrick carved out a distinctive sound that could be arid, raw, spiritual and pop-focussed all at once. But a lot has changed in the five years since Geowulf released their second record, 2019’s My Resignation. The world is different now, and so is Kendrick, who, since that album was released, parted ways (amicably!) with Banjanin, trained to become a mental health worker, and had a baby. With those giant, tectonic changes comes The Child: Kendrick’s resplendent, emotionally resonant third album, a record that meets those higher stakes with unprecedented honesty and a firmly-trained eye. “I feel like this album is my most personal lyrically – I’m talking about becoming a mum, as well as my own family,” she says. Across The Child’s timeless-sounding psych-pop songs, Kendrick sings of friendships, familial ties and new motherhood with clarity and profound confidence. “I’ve written a lot about heartbreak and relationships in the past, and I think on this album I finally found the space where I could tell more personal stories.” Written largely in 2023 in her home studio in Noosa, Queensland, and produced by Geoff Roberts, when Kendrick was six months pregnant with her first child, The Child came from a period in which she had to take stock of her life thus far, and make some hard decisions about what she wanted to do with her future. “When I was writing about relationship stuff and romance, it was important, but it was also kind of a bandaid – I was essentially distracting myself by writing about ****boys,” she says. The Child, as a title, refers both to Kendrick’s new baby as well as the child she herself once was, and all that child endured to get to where Kendrick is today. “This album was a lot of me trying to work out what my new life would look like as a mother, and, through that, processing stuff from when I was a child.”