Sarah Levins Spies Synchronicity
Photo by James Tarbotton
On her new single “Eye Spy,” Sydney singer-songwriter Sarah Levins opens a new chapter with ambition and heart.
It’s been about a year since Sarah Levins arrived with North Birds, an intimate EP that paired her evocative pen with fits of lush instrumentation. That auspicious debut hinted at a bright future, and in the year since, Sarah’s been working hard on her next project. Not only that, but she’s been working hard on everybody else's, too.
“Eye Spy” is Sarah’s first release of 2024, but her hands have hardly been idle, having contributed backing vocals to Nick Ward’s excellent “Shooting Star,” and featuring prominently on Jerome Blazé’s fantastic Living Room. In Levins, Blazé has found both a collaborator and a muse — the couple’s chemistry carries through the cables, and for one of his album’s foremost highlights, “Emerge (For Sarah),” Blazé sets Sarah singing on her own dedication.
If the relationship between Blazé and Levins is immediately clear, it’s far from the only one held in high regard. The minor musical world they’ve built around them is fuelled by keen collaborators, a fact attested to by the easily uncovered credits, exhaustive and appreciative. The overall impression is one of reverent craft, art created with a respect for the ineffable character that each player brings to their respective instrument. “Eye Spy,” a clear step forward for Levins, finds her expanding sound staffed with this excellent roster.
An acoustic guitar ushers in tinkering percussion; a subtle bass line ekes out a steady groove underneath Sarah’s voice. “There's a hole in your irises like a ball of black blotted ink, it gets bigger when you blink,” she sings, slowly pulling the track into resplendence: the strings lift into the refrain, the backing vocals flank her, a delicate piano softly tinkers away. That’s Josh Spolc on bass, holding down the track with Bonnie Stewart on drums; at the end of the refrain, Jerome Blazé lets loose a quick synth riff that further deepens the textures, the ear-catching detail hinting at the song’s ever-building structure.
The first half of “Eye Spy” is laden with these fun asides, with slight pops and scratching strings dancing around Sarah’s playful lyrics. At one point, someone lets out a loud sigh. It’s not a quiet aside picked up on a mic, but an unmistakable sample from what feels like an old film. In amongst it all, Sarah’s ruminations lead us through the profound — “I have time, so they tell me / like a sentence, don't know how it ends” — to arrive at a light release, borne by the realization that for all the staggering cosmic synchronicity, there’s really nothing to be said for it.
There’s a quick instrumental retreat to Sarah’s solitary voice, a spotlit aside that lulls into a fleeting peace, only to burst forth into the invigorated second half. The kitchen-sink crescendo, filled with smatterings of clinking cutlery and blown-out backing vocals, frame Sarah’s voice as the clam in the chaos. Her steadiness amongst the cacophony mirrors one of her thoughtful lyrics: “the only guarantee's uncertainty, you have to learn to love the dance.”
The track “is all about noticing that everything is linked and that there is always more than meets the eye,” says Sarah in an explanatory note. “There are so many patterns in giant things like outer space that then repeat themselves in much smaller things like river systems or wrinkles on your face - the more you dig, the more it seems to be connected. To me, that connection is both really intense and serious and completely unserious and joyful at the same time,” she continues, gesturing to the central refrain: “Nothing is coincidence, nothing is so serious.” “I wanted the music to mess with scale for the listener to create this feeling of contrast between the micro and macro, building to a big, pressure-relieving point of catharsis at the end of the song.”
Photo by James Tarbotton
“Eye Spy,” like Blazé’s Living Room before it, emphasizes the union of sight and sound. James Tarbotton is many things — by his own ranking, “a photographer, a videographer and musician” — and in Levins’ circle, he’s managed to be all three. Tarbotton, in concert with Blazé, devised the cozy clips for tracks like his 2024 single “Is This What I Have Missed?,” setting a cross-legged Levins in a Sydney living room and building an entire band into the space.
In collaboration with Levins for “Eye Spy,” the scene is far more spacious, with a tight single pulling back to reveal a four-piece band spotlit on a simple stage. This setup, with closer details inserted in Tarbotton’s signature splitscreen, furnishes the track’s opening, only to transition into the soaring second phase on a beautiful beachside cliff. Here, as in his other work, there’s an easy warmth to the image, pairing well with the production finesse of Levins and Blazé. “This video is the first of four chapters of visuals that play with a key, unrevealed concept that I can’t wait to share,” teases Sarah.
This new era, billed as a conceptual series built about “circles and cycles,” is set to be more than just a record. Sarah’s vision includes music, videos and gigs that work in tandem to explore some mysterious concept, presumably — like the universe itself — interlinked and reflected across forms. It’s an intriguing sell that promises a big year for Sarah, and after a quietly excellent 2024, “Eye Spy” sets the scene for an even more exciting 2025.