Twenty years since her haunting debut, the Australian singer-songwriter’s latest album explores her religious upbringing and seismic shifts in her life

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They say things come in threes. For Sarah Blasko, that came true in 2020. “A lot of really huge things happened to me in that year: the end of a lifelong friendship, I had a baby and the world was ending,” she says. “The poetry of it was something that I couldn’t deny.”

One of Australia’s most revered contemporary singer-songwriters, Blasko was raised in the Pentecostal church believing in – and waiting for – the apocalypse. Despite having left the church long ago, this triptych of life-rumbling events seemed like the big one.