+ HOLLIE JOYCE

+ ALEXANDER BIGGS

No stranger to the Australian music scene after many all-nighters spent wheeling across the country in indie-rock bands, this year signals a new beginning for Melbourne’s Mickey Cooper, with the release of his debut solo album Hit The Ceiling.

Recorded in a shoebox apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Hit The Ceiling is a collection of ten songs that dissects anxiety and documents the events and aftermath of a family breaking apart. The bare-bones recordings were taken to Bryce Goggin’s (Pavement, Joan As Police Woman, Ben Kweller) studio in Brooklyn, where his mixing expertise helped to highlight each melodic hook and pull, culminating in the kind of refined, yet stripped-back record that recalls early Elliott Smith, Whiskeytown or Sharon Van Etten. Fiercely personal and universally relatable, Hit The Ceiling showcases not only Cooper’s love of chords and melody, but a knack for wordplay that saw him collect the Dorothy Porter Award for Emerging Poets in 2015. 

Mickey Cooper launches Hit The Ceiling at the Wesley Anne on Sunday September 11, with support from Alexander Biggs and Hollie Joyce.