There are, of course, countless reasons why we love attending gigs and feeding on the buzz that only live music can give. On the Americana circuit that we inhabit in these pages, often at smaller and more intimate venues, opportunity is often given to a lesser, or indeed, complete unknown, to showcase their talents as a support artist.
The wonderful Emily Barker returned to these shores from her native Australia in 2025 and brought with her fellow Aussie, Liz Stringer. Now based in London, in reviews from around the UK, Stringer consistently impressed even within the naturally limited time constraints imposed on a support artist.
A stranger in these parts she may be, but in her native Australia, Stringer has long been a well-respected part of the music scene, and her credits include 60 shows with Aussie rockers Midnight Oil as backing vocalist and occasional instrumentalist over a two-year period from 2020. Stringer released her debut album Soon way back in 2006 and a further six have followed up to 2025’s The Second High.
If early recordings immediately demonstrated her skills as a songwriter, polished vocalist and live performer, a trawl through subsequent albums demonstrates a gradual transition from the style that attracted folk awards to a fuller band sound incorporating a much wider range of musical influences, including jazz, soul and funk. The ballads remain as devastatingly engaging as ever, but this gradual widening of musical range is now recognised by the fact that her 2021 album First Time Really Feeling won the album of the year award from the Australian Independent Record Awards in the Blues and Roots category. That 2025 follow-up also received a nomination in the same category.
The success of those last two albums, on the back of that high-profile tour with Midnight Oil, came after Stringer’s admission of her struggles with alcohol addiction. The period of getting sober allowed her to see her songs in a different light, her songwriting becoming, in her own words, much more personal and honest. Dangerous, a song from First Time Really Feeling, garnered song of the year nominations in Australia. Written after a brutally honest confession of a fan, it tells of the self-recognition of alcoholism and the damage it does and then the hope that comes from recovery. It is a magnificent anthem, and that desire to be honest and personal in her songwriting is writ large here.
Stringer’s vocals are unmistakably Australian. If that sounds like stating the bleedin’ obvious coming from an Australian artist, the accent is so noticeable that it warrants highlighting. There are so many artists who hide their origins away in their singing, adopting the neutral tone that many are familiar with, but here is a proud Aussie belting her roots out for all to hear.
A search for Liz Stringer on these pages will, up to this point, garner no hits. And, in view of her more recent move away from what might ordinarily sit comfortably under the Americana umbrella, this piece may well prove to be an outlier, but in a category that is always up for debate, let the listener decide for themselves. This is still a voice that deserves to be heard. It is, after all, good enough for Emily Barker.
