Thelma Plum

Select Music presents Thelma Plum
With special guest Molly Millington

Thelma Plum is a 24-year-old Gamilaraay woman, musician and creator. She grew up in Brisbane and spent many of her childhood years on her Grandparents’ farm in Delungra, a small country town in rural New South Wales. She has been making music for her whole life, but hasn’t always been ready to share her story, until now.

Thelma Plum’s debut album Better In Blak is a story about culture, heritage, love, and pain. With incredible strength, courage and heartbreaking tenderness, her debut album captures so deftly what it’s like to be a young Aboriginal woman in Australia. Since releasing her 2014 EP Monsters, Thelma has been through a lot. “On this album I speak about how it feels being an Aboriginal woman in this country. When I was younger I wasn’t ready to share this side of me, but I’ve grown a lot in the past few years and that’s changed,” says Thelma.

Thelma started working on her debut album four years ago. In fact, she had an album of songs ready to go, but she scrapped it entirely and decided to start again. “I’d written all these songs, but they didn’t represent what I’d been through. So, I rewrote the whole thing,” explains Thelma. “The new songs just came to me, because I’d reached a point in my life where I was very ready to write them”.

Listening to Better In Blak, you can tell that this is true. Written and recorded across New York, London and Sydney with her frequent collaborator, producer Alex Burnett (Antony & Cleopatra, Sparkadia), the album is 12 tracks of Thelma at her best; brutally honest, insightful, incisive and with her heart on her sleeve. You can hear it on the album’s title track – a tribute to family and people of colour – or on the album’s anthemic second song ‘Don’t Let A Good Girl Down’, where she spins her experiences of hate and bigotry into a hard-hitting pop song.

Don’t miss the incredible Thelma Plum as she makes her Brunswick Picture House debut for two big shows!

Great Southern Nights is a new event to kick-start the recovery of the live music industry – featuring 1000 COVID-safe gigs across Sydney and Regional NSW, throughout November 2020 (Australian Music Month). Great Southern Nights is a NSW Government initiative, delivered by Destination NSW in partnership with ARIA. For more information, please visit greatsouthernnights.com.au.