Fanny Lumsden Announces New Album 'Hey Dawn' and Australian Tour

Australian folk/country artist Fanny Lumsden has announced her fourth album, Hey Dawn. The follow-up to 2020’s ARIA-winning Fallow will arrive Friday, 4th August, and be launched with an extensive national tour that kicks off in late July.

To coincide with the announcement, Lumsden has shared the album’s title track, alongside a video directed by Lumsden herself and her husband and bandmate Dan Stanley Freeman. It’s the second single to be released from Hey Dawn, following last month’s ‘Millionare’. The ‘Hey Dawn’ clip was filmed at Gunbar on New South Wales’ Hay plains, on Wiradjuri and Ngarigo land. Watch that below. Album pre-orders are available here.

“I wanted it to feel good, I wanted to have fun,” Lumsden said of her fourth album in a statement. “I didn’t want to think too hard about it – I just wanted to feel.” The album was recorded with Lumsden’s longtime producer Matt Fell, who helmed all three of her previous studio albums.

In a statement, Lumsden described how a chance encounter in a local hall where a man was playing piano sparked a creative drive during the album’s sessions. “The only pre-idea I had for the record was I knew I wanted the sound of a piano that felt like you were in a hall when you were a kid, and I walked into this hall and this old man was playing this vision of what I had in my head,” Lumsden said. The same night, she wrote the album’s title track.

“I was a bit stuck after Fallow and didn’t know where to go, and that unlocked it: ‘Oh, you just need to wake up, it’s a new day, it’s a new moment, every day is a new moment, and you just need to be where you are right now. Forget about Fallow, forget about all the other things, just be now,” she said. “You have to tell the stories of the moment you’re in, and you have to put them out and trust that that is okay. It’s a new day, we’re here.”

Lumsden – who is currently playing a string of regional dates as part of her Country Halls tour before she heads over to the UK to play Glastonbury Festival in June – will launch Hey Dawn with an extensive national tour, joined by her backing band, the Prawn Stars.

The Hey Dawn tour will kick off Friday, 28th July at Bendigo Bank Theatre, before dates in Ballarat, Anglesea, Canberra, Wagga, Benalla, Brunswick Heads, Pomona, Maryborough, Toowoomba, Brisbane, Melbourne, Meeniyan, Bundalaguah, Milton, Sydney and Newcastle. See dates below.