© Lauren Baxter 2021.
Breakthrough
noun
A sudden, dramatic, and important discovery or development.
It’s a buzzword that we hear thrown around a lot in our industry. But what does it actually mean? How can you categorise someone as a breakthrough artist? Is it more than simply acknowledging someone at the start of their career?
All five of the acts this year are solo artists. Four of the five are female. Three of the five spoke to us for this story. All are breaking through in their own way.
But first, let’s get technical. Originally cropping up in 1989, Breakthrough Awards were presented for both Album and Single until they were merged at the 2010 awards. Judged by the Voting Academy (made up of 800 industry experts), both solo artists and groups are eligible, as are both album and single recordings as long as the music was released in the past year. The release must also have appeared in either the ARIA Top 100 Albums Chart or Top 100 Singles Chart in this time. Furthermore, artists and groups are not eligible if they or any member have previously been a final five nominee in an ARIA Awards category or had a previous release that featured in the Top 50 Albums or Singles chart.
Still with us? Speaking about the category Dan Rosen, Chief Executive of ARIA thinks it has “always been a very special ARIA Awards category as it acknowledges artists at the very beginning of their career”.
“A list of past recipients is a roll call of some of our greatest artists including Delta Goodrem, The Living End, Savage Garden, Silverchair, Flume and Courtney Barnett. Last year’s winner Amy Shark has had an incredible 12 months, going from Breakthrough Artist to being nominated for nine ARIAs. This year’s nominees are an amazing crop of artists and it will undoubtedly be a tough race for the coveted award.”
In a sense, artistic careers have never realistically been defined – nor should they – by the immediacy of commercial success. Still, it is part of human nature to crave recognition. And this mainstream acknowledgement is not something to be sneered at. It’s something that all three of the artists welcome with open arms.
Rising star Odette aka Georgia Sallybanks beams positivity down the line of the telephone. “How insane! Like what!” she is flabbergasted. “It’s just been crazy. Honestly, when really good things happen, I think a part of me like forgets just a little bit so I’m surprised later on. So when you bring up the two ARIA nominations, I hadn’t even thought about that this morning and now I am on cloud nine.”
“When something crazy happens I freak out about it like two weeks later, so it kind of looks like I don’t really care,” teen sensation Ruel van Dijk shares a similar method of processing as he sits in an airport about to board a plane for his first headline tour of Europe. “I care a lot! It’s just that I’m still thinking about the thing from two weeks ago, you know what I mean.”
He’s admittedly a “little bit nervous” considering he has “never been to an awards show” but at the end of the day, it’s pure unfiltered humility. “I’m really just gobsmacked about all this. I really don’t know how to react. I still don’t think it’s real. I just don’t know how to comprehend really any of this. It’s very fast. I’m just really grateful and it’s just weird to think that my music is being recognised to such a large extent.”
Mojo “Juju” Ruiz de Luzuriaga has too put out what has been called one of the most important records of the year.
Ruminating on the mainstream recognition she says, “It’s funny… it’s kind of representative of this greater industry and that industry recognition that you hope for but I guess as a working musician you just exist in this industry that operates regardless of that as well.”
“So it’s sort of like as a working musician and a professional musician you kind of are just going about your business, doing your thing, trying to make a living you know and I guess I’ve never really considered myself or thought of myself in the broader context of all of that but to have that happen it’s like, ‘Oh wow cool.’ That’s a really nice kind of acknowledgement from the industry. It’s very humbling and appreciated for sure.”
But do they think they have broken through? Whatever they take that to mean.
“Probably not, I mean not yet,” Sallybanks ponders. “I don’t think I’ll ever be like truly satisfied. I always want to keep pushing and keep going and keep working and never lose my… what’s the word? Vigour, yeah.”
“I don’t feel like I’ve broken through yet,” van Dijk laughs. “I feel like I’m still going. I feel like everyone’s still going. Everyone’s still breaking through. No-one really settles, but yeah, it’s cool.”
“You know, it is a funny thing to sort of hear about yourself when you’ve been working in the industry for over a decade,” Mojo Juju chuckles too. “But it’s also like, yeah it’s cool, I’m happy for this record to be the thing that does sort of get through to a broader audience and a greater industry. It’s definitely for me the best record I’ve made and probably the most important record that I’ve made as well. Important for me on a really personal level.”
All these artists have put out intensely personal records. Records that were written for themselves. Perhaps this is why they have resonated so deeply with their audiences.
“I’m hoping that maybe someone hears this record and feels empowered to share their story or feels inspired to reflect on their story,” Mojo Juju begins. “I hope so but I would never ever and I never set out to be a spokesperson for anyone else, I was just telling my story and my truth.
“It’s really important to me that I maintain that ownership of it… It’s really important for me to be transparent about the fact that this is a journey for me and I’m still learning so much and I’m just telling my story.”
Sallybanks too speaks of the journey she has been on since beginning to write these songs over five years ago. “I was once this completely different person who had all this absolute chaos happening around her and out of that I wrote these songs that aren’t doing fricking terrible,” she reflects in a moment of epiphany. “Actually wow I’ve never really thought about it like this. Sometimes you talk and hope for the best and then you have this realisation – that’s what’s happening right now. It’s a nice feeling because it’s reaffirming that everything I did to try and cope wasn’t futile and it makes me kind of proud of myself.”
Looking back at some of the past alumni, it’s not hard to tell ARIA have hit the nail on the head with their picks. Does being in such esteemed company help to put things into perspective?
“Probably,” Sallybanks presumes. “I try not to think about it too much because then the pressure is so much but it’s kind of like fricking amazing that I’m getting recognition alongside people that I’ve admired for a really long time.”
Van Dijk too thinks “it’s definitely very strange to be placed in that category”.
“It’s very weird to think that all this has happened so fast but yeah I do sometimes think, ‘Oh shit, this is happening, this is kicking off.’”
So what about all this talk that this is the year for women at the ARIAs?
It’s something Mojo Juju and Sallybanks take with a grain of salt. “I think we’re in a really exciting time at the moment – not because everyone’s going, ‘Look at all the women,’ because, we’ve always been here you know,” Sallybanks starts.
“I think we are in an exciting time where people at the moment are going look at all these women which means in the future, people will stop going look at all these women, just look at these artists. That’s something I’m excited for.
“It’s really fricking awesome to see women of all walks of life just all coming together in this and just killing it. But yeah I think Australian music can be stereotyped I think as one thing so people only look out for one idea of what it is and you know, it’s like, ‘We’re here! We’re making music! We’re doing it.’”
Mojo Juju agrees. “I think there’s a lot of incredible women in the Australian music industry right now and I think there always has been you know, but I have noticed and it really feels like there are so many incredible women who are really at the top of their game in the Australian music industry right now and I think it’s just a reflection of that really.
“I think it’s pretty hard to ignore right now.”
Sallybanks and Mojo Juju also have a couple of other nominations under their belts, for Best Adult Contemporary Album, and then Best Urban Release and Best Video respectively. Sallybanks is, to be honest, just stoked to be in the same category as Missy Higgins: “The one thing that absolutely floored me was the Adult Contemporary. Because that was the whole album… Breakthrough Artist is a huge deal too but like in Adult Contemporary, I literally got nominated next to Missy Higgins, like, they read our names out consecutively. I was like, ‘Seriously!’
In saying that, a lot of To A Stranger was written when she was 15 – does she feel like an adult? “Maybe because I do taxes now – that makes me an adult,” she giggles.
Mojo Juju has also released one of the year’s most powerful videos; one that she reconnected with Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore, the director of Her Sound, Her Story, for.
“I reckon within like 20 minutes I was just spilling, you know, my most intimate thoughts and feelings about being a woman of colour in the Australian music industry and what that experience had been like,” she remembers of the experience.
“There was really something about them that just compelled me to want to tell that story more than ever and I was like, ‘Yeah I really want to share this with you and no-one’s ever asked me such thoughtful questions before in a way that made me feel safe to share that,’ so we connected immediately.”
That connection led them to work together again on the clip for Native Tongue. “We were backstage after my show [at the Perth International Arts Festival] and both Claudia and Josh [Bond] who manages Djuki Mala were like, ‘Wow, that song! We really have to do something with that song.’
“It just came together so organically like, there wasn’t a lot of time. There wasn’t a lot of money but it just came out of creativity and everyone’s belief in the project. I think that’s when some really incredible stuff gets made.”
Original article: The Music November Issue