Amy Shark

Gold Coast, 2016: a decade of nothing, then "Adore"

Amy Louise Billings was born on the Gold Coast on 14 May 1986, and spent most of her twenties making records almost nobody heard. Between 2008 and 2012 she worked under the name Amy Cushway, releasing a run of EPs and a debut album, It's a Happy City, in 2012. The Amy Shark name came in 2013, lifted from Jaws, her favourite film. She married Shane Billings on 11 May 2013; the couple later left the Gold Coast for Sydney.

The turn came in July 2016 with "Adore", a song that paired a close, conversational vocal with a guitar figure barely louder than the voice on top of it. It reached No. 3 on the ARIA singles chart, finished second in Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2016, and has since been certified seven-times platinum in Australia. A deal with Wonderlick, through Sony, followed, which is the arrangement she still records under.

What "Adore" set up was a template rather than a one-off: small-scale writing about specific people, delivered without much vocal performance in the way. Nearly every record since has been measured against it, including, as several writers noted this year, soft pop.

The run of records, and the awards that came with them

The Night Thinker EP arrived in April 2017 and won Best Pop Release at that year's ARIA Awards. Love Monster followed in July 2018, debuted at No. 1 on the ARIA albums chart, and took both Album of the Year and Best Pop Release. Cry Forever came in April 2021 and moved in the opposite direction from the early work, bringing in outside names — Ed Sheeran among them. Sunday Sadness, her third album as Amy Shark, was released on 16 August 2024 and was followed by the Sadness Tour, which opened at Auckland Town Hall on 12 October 2024.

Across that stretch she has won eight ARIA Music Awards, Best Pop Release three times among them. In July 2023 she added a Logie, the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent, for her first year judging the revived Australian Idol alongside Kyle Sandilands, Meghan Trainor and Harry Connick Jr. She has judged the show since 2023 and returned for a fourth consecutive season at the start of 2026, which has given her a weeknight television profile most Australian songwriters of her commercial standing do not have.

The Logie also put her in the small group of Australians holding both an ARIA and a Logie — a useful shorthand for how far outside music her name now travels.

A church in Wales, eleven songs, no co-writers

soft pop was released on 24 July 2026 on Amy Shark's own imprint through Wonderlick and Sony Music Australia. It runs eleven tracks and 32 minutes 29 seconds, and every one of those tracks is credited to Amy Billings alone. There are no co-writes and no featured artists — a first for her.

The writing was done in her apartment inside a self-imposed one-month deadline. She has said a new guitar tuning set the direction, and that the compression helped: "I got some really urgent and fun and different sounding songs. I don't think I would have written like this if I'd had more time." On the break with her earlier sound she was blunter: "I felt like I needed a challenge and I needed a fresh sound. Every old sound that I had has been thrown in the bin." The record leans on acoustic guitar and largely does without drums.

Recording happened at a converted church in Wales owned by Dann Hume, who has produced her before and co-produced here. Her account of it was unqualified: "everything worked, I can't explain how much everything worked on this album. It was really meant to be." Ahead of release she told Rolling Stone Australia, "this is the best album I've ever written. I know that."

The singles tracked the campaign across 2026: "The Biggest Dick" on 11 March, "Our Last Fight" on 17 April, "Child of Divorce" on 22 May, "It's Kinda Hot" on 26 June, and "Movies" on 11 September, after the album had landed.

Standing, November 2026

On the ARIA chart dated 31 July 2026, soft pop entered at No. 2 on the all-comers albums chart, held off the top by Charli XCX's Music, Fashion, Film. It took No. 1 on the ARIA Australian Albums chart and No. 4 on vinyl. That is a strong result for a record with no features and no obvious radio centrepiece, and it is the framing the album is now promoted under.

Critical response was better than the chart placing suggests. Showbiz by PS gave it 7.9 out of 10 on 25 July 2026, calling it "easily Amy Shark's best album" and arguing that "by stripping away the expected arena-sized choruses, larger-than-life production – and even guest appearances – Shark's songwriting is at its strongest", while flagging "Ruins", "I Know a Place Just Up the Street" and "Not Old Enough to Drive" as the weaker stretch. Listener reaction has been cooler: the album sits on a user score of 61 from 66 ratings at Album of the Year.

At the 2026 ARIA Awards, held on 18 November 2026 at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney and broadcast on Network 10, her nomination is for Best Cover Art, with the sleeve credited to Connor Dewhurst — the one nomination from the soft pop cycle rather than a nod in the performance categories.

Her 2026 live work has been scattered across one-offs rather than a conventional album tour: an in-store at Westfield Tuggerah on 26 July, Marvel Stadium in Melbourne for the Four'N Twenty Legends Game on 27 August, and Accor Stadium in Sydney on 4 October. Four dates are currently on sale: Tuning Fork in Auckland on 15 November 2026, her only New Zealand show of the year, which went on sale through Live Nation on 28 October; Castaway Festival at Whitfords Nodes Park in Hillarys, Western Australia, on 21 November 2026; Mornington Racecourse in Victoria on 12 December 2026; and Stuart Park in North Wollongong on 20 March 2027.

What the shows look like now

The Auckland date is billed as an intimate show drawing on a decade of material, from "Adore" through to "Movies", and the venue size reflects that: Tuning Fork is the small room attached to Spark Arena, not the Town Hall she played in 2024. She first played New Zealand in 2017 and has since sold out rooms in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Running alongside the band shows is the Solo Acoustic Songs & Stories format, which is exactly what the name says — Shark, a guitar, and spoken introductions to each song. Setlist.fm has 47 setlists logged from that run; the average is sixteen songs and no encore, opening with "C'mon" and "Adore" and closing on "I Said Hi", with "Two Friends", "Beautiful Eyes", "Mess Her Up" and "Can I Shower At Yours" recurring in the middle. Covers appear regularly: Morgan Wallen's "Last Night" seven times across those setlists, The Killers' "Mr. Brightside" twice.

Reviewers have been consistently positive without being effusive. Aggregated across 29 critic reviews, her live work scores 78 per cent, with the consensus describing shows that are emotional, confident and loud; sets have typically run between 45 and 90 minutes depending on whether she is headlining or filling a festival slot. The 13th Floor's take on the Auckland Town Hall opener in October 2024 was that she was "bringing joy to fans young and old". Support has generally come from a single local or Australian opener — Cult Romance opened her Caloundra show in August 2022 — rather than a packaged bill.