At Splendour, Shark has her finest hour
FEEDING off an adoring crowd at the Splendour amphitheatre this afternoon, Amy Shark must have felt like she was swimming in a sea of unreality.
Shark, the Gold Coast indie pop darling, had spoken in the days leading up to the festival how, after playing years on the GC pub circuit, she thought this moment was probably unattainable.
Yet there she was, playing to a bulging amphitheatre, announcing that her album Love Monster had just ascended to No 1 on the Australian Album Charts, knocking off Drake no less.
Shark had found out the career-defining news just before her set. On stage, she broke into disbelieving head shakes multiple times, awed by how far she'd come.
"I have a guitar-tech now," she observed at one point, seemingly levitating.
Across her set, Shark took a big chunk out of Love Monster and fed it back to the crowd.
The album covers a lot of ground: from the acoustic finger-picking ballad Pyscho, to the pure pop of All Loved Up and the anthemic I Said Hi, Shark's appeal is broad, and her fans love her for it.
At times there is a Taylor Swiftian quality to her songwriting:
We've been kicking these words around too long
Had a feeling we were close to something big
A deep breath under a baseball cap
A one way ticket to a heart attack
Shark might have been parodying the relative low expectations she once harboured for her career when she wheeled out Wheatus's Teenage Dirtbag as a cover, much to the thrill of the crowd.
It was only fitting for Shark to end her crowning moment how it all began, closing the set with Adore, the number two track in the 2016 Triple J Hottest 100 that initially catapulted her to stardom.
She might have one day been the teenage dirtbag playing unremarkable sets on the Gold Coast.
Now, Shark is a star, with two tickets to Iron Maiden.
