We Speak Music
Award-winning Aussie Americana artist HELEN TOWNSEND asks ‘Is This Love’ with new single!

Australian Americana artist Helen Townsend is that rare artist who can make large venues feel like lounge rooms. Get comfy and lean into her richly lyrical songs, get up and dance, sing along because she’s singing about you, fall in love with the stagecraft — whatever your desire, it’s all good because it’s just you and Helen. When the lights go up no one will ever know.
Townsend’s new single, ‘Is This Love’, asks the age-old question, the one we’ve all wanted answered sometime or another. Dressed up in irresistible honky tonk blues, ‘Is This Love’ is an instant dance-floor filler and the first leg of a musical oeuvre that has Townsend at the peak of her powers and will have audiences beaming and calling out for more.
Helen Townsend may have been late in picking up the tools of her trade but in a short time she has shown herself to be a master craftsman in a field too often crowded with cowboy-booted jacks and jills of all trades. Her sweet voice and tender picking rubs against songs that are filled with characters living with the costly results of impulsive choices and memories that just won’t let go. Her music takes you on a journey through beautiful valleys, coastal plains and soaring over mountains with a few deep, dark tunnels to keep you grounded.
She has carved out a reputation for edgy Americana music – one that has pushed the genre’s boundaries from roots-rock through blues and country to folk – with her upcoming album, Helen has broadened her style and flair even more so with catchy new melodies, tight harmonies and personal stories and lyrics that hook into your heart and tear up your soul. The new album builds from her previous 2 EP’s and her debut album, which scored her multiple awards and nominations including winner of WA Country Music Award for Best Emerging Artist and Song of the year.
Townsend has continued to extend her musical influence with her recent US shows and was part of the Sounds Australia Showcase at the coveted Americanafest in Nashville. All this on top of the US launch of her EP “Love, Lies ‘n’ Leaving” which found its way into the FAI top 10 Folk albums chart in the US for September 2022 has increased Helens popularity in Australia and abroad.
With ‘Is This Love’, Townsend is making her first exploration into UK territory, with plans for a UK tour and new album release to come next year. The video for the single is pure Americana nostalgia with Townsend and band arriving via a classic car to tear things up at a swinging rock ‘n’ roll bar. Through out it, we see Townsend question ‘Is This Love’ with her partner and fellow Australian musician Shannon Smith, as they share a dance, cocktails and eventually make plans to meet again. Much of Townsend’s forthcoming new album has been inspired by her new relationship with Shannon Smith, who has also channelled their love for each other in his own upcoming music project, both albums being written respectively from their different sides of the relationship, as these two musicians forged their bond.
We Speak Music
2AP – Two Alien Planets Find Beauty in the Noise with “Sweet Harmony”
What if the world isn’t too loud… what if it’s just your head?
Brno-based duo 2AP – Two Alien Planets tackle that familiar feeling in their new single “Sweet Harmony”: a warm, guitar-driven alternative track about finding your way back to the present when your mind refuses to switch off.
It starts with a bright guitar riff and Lenka K.’s airy soprano, sounding almost like a breath of fresh air. Then the song begins to expand. Guitars gather momentum, the rhythm lifts, and Jarek H.’s warm baritone joins the picture.
By the final chorus, it’s no longer one voice trying to quiet the noise. It’s two voices finding their way through it together.
And that’s where “Sweet Harmony” really hits.
The lyrics balance simple, beautiful things — wind, sunshine, rain, a strand of hair in the breeze — against a much less peaceful inner landscape: a “stormy brain,” angry birds and snakes of grief.
There are no wellness clichés here. No promise that everything suddenly becomes fine.
Instead, the song suggests something more realistic: maybe the beauty is already there. We just have to hear it.
Musically, 2AP blend the melodic warmth of alternative pop-rock with a cinematic indie atmosphere. It’s dreamy without drifting away, emotional without becoming gloomy, and driven by the chemistry between Lenka’s soprano and Jarek’s baritone.
Think 90s/2000s alternative warmth meeting contemporary indie songwriting, with enough guitar to keep things moving and enough space to let the lyrics breathe.
The artwork captures the same tension: warm flowers behind a dark fence. Beauty on one side. Something getting in the way on the other.
“Sweet Harmony” doesn’t ask you to tear the fence down.
It just asks you to look through it.
3:42 of dreamy guitars, two voices, and one very restless brain.
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