"I needed to be turned inside out": Ngaiire on new album, 3

Not everyone is going to ‘get’ Ngaiire, and the personal journey the Papua New Guinean, Australian-based R&B soul singer undertook while putting her third album, 3 together made her realise that being a multi-faceted woman of colour is perfectly acceptable, even if it causes people to shift uncomfortably in their seats.

In her own words, Ngaiire (pronounced Ny-ree) is a bit odd, a bit queer. Known for her boisterous costumes, stellar vocals and tight beats, she knows the music industry has struggled to put her in a box for years – “I constantly had to field useless enquiries from white people who wanted to know if we all still ate people, or why I was so pretty for a Papua New Guinean” – and doesn’t beat around the bush about not being “the right kind” of black to be commercial enough.

Full of joy, but also a little (rightfully!) angry, Ngaiire feels a walking contradiction at times – torn between her Papua New Guinean roots while now living in Sydney in a predominantly white space that operates on stolen indigenous land. 

She’s just turned 37 when Headliner speaks to her; “a bit past the used by date according to industry standards because [I] had a baby, but fuck it, I’d like to see you pull a human out of your dick whilst creating an album!”

Although she doesn’t always channel this fiery defense – she’s fun and self-deprecating during our interview – at once philosophical and down to earth – and she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She celebrated her lockdown birthday with a Zoom party (Ngai Paul’s drag race: prison hoes & lockdown woes), where her friends dressed in drag and performed her songs to her. 

She likes tequila and margaritas, doesn’t drink coffee – “it makes me crazy” – and she’s a bit obsessed with death, sex, life, spirits, fashion, expensive cocktails, art, board games, rice and bully beef, sitting on the beach all day, and living beyond her means.

“And definitely not your normal cup of tea out of a fucking dainty little English teacup,” she says, grinning wickedly. 

“As much as I’ve tried to pour myself into that teacup over the years, I’ve accepted that I’m really better suited to a brilliantly well-charcoaled aluminium kettle full of black tea leaves cooked on a very lived-in fire built upon the soil that smells like my mother, my Aine, my Pupu and those that came before who said, ‘reach for the stars but always come back to us’.”

3 began as an experiment in 2017 to go back to her home country in the hopes of extracting unique aspects of her culture to present in a contemporary context, although it quickly turned into an “expensive therapy session” on the damages code-switching can create for women of colour when trying to survive in spaces that don’t understand where they come from.

“It was challenging, but I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason, and I think it really stretched me, creatively,” she reflects. 

“You can get so comfortable coasting along as an artist, so for my journey I needed to be challenged in that way. As someone who's a Papua New Guinean who has lived in Australia for a long time, because my music is so personal and so connected to who I am, I needed to go back to rediscover my centre. 

"I needed to know that I actually don't need to prove to anyone who I am as a Papua New Guinean woman making contemporary music: that's who I am, and if no one wants to come to the table, or no one wants to do the work to understand what that means, then that’s on them. Just make the music that you want to make – I wouldn't have come to that realisation without having made that trip, even though it was hard. I needed to be stretched, I needed to be turned inside out.”

A highlight of 3 is unquestionably the pleading ballad, Him. With lyrics including: ‘Please don't let him think that he's the reason that I went away / Please always be kind to him, be strong for him, oh Lord I pray’, even without knowing the context, there can be no doubt that a deeply personal story lies behind the song. Ngaiire shares that the track is a letter to her then-unborn son.

“I tried to keep this story quite private just for my own safety, but the more people that asked me, the more I feel like it needs to be told,” she shares, taking a deep breath.

“During the time that we were putting the album together I got quite sick; I had cancer when I was a youngster. The album is about three years late because I had some really, really major issues with health. During my pregnancy with my first and only child, I had crazy, acute abdominal pains. I was in so much pain to the point where I was on so many narcotics and opioids, and I was popping eight to 12 Endones a day. When it didn't touch the sides, I would head back into hospital and they put me on morphine. 

"Because I was pregnant, no one could run the normal tests that they would normally run, so everyone was speculating and doing a trial and error thing to try to find out what was wrong with me. It got to a point where I thought, ‘this pain is actually going to kill me’. If I was in a building and there was a glass window, I would have run through that window because the pain got to the point where it was completely unbearable. 

"I remember sitting down with my husband and we had to have a tough conversation: ‘What if you don't make it? What if our child doesn't make it? What if you both don't make it?’ It was just the worst conversation to have, and the song, Him came out of that. It’s me asking, ‘what am I going to leave this child if I don't make it and he survives?’ I've kept it to myself a long time, and talking about it more makes it easier to carry.”

Ngaiire gave birth to a healthy son in 2018, which put everything in perspective, including whether or not people ‘get’ her as an artist.

“That was the turning point,” she confirms. “After I had my son I had a few operations to try to rectify the situation, and I got better. During that time, I lost so many shows and I was completely out of control of my own body, my career and my relationships with people. At that point, I was like, ‘it really does not matter if people get me or not’. 

"I started to realise that what actually mattered is life – the fact that I am alive – I'm living and I have a healthy son and a happy family. As long as I'm true to who I am, and I'm honest, and I'm a kind and respectful person to other people, I don't have to prove where I come from. It's tiring trying to prove yourself to people, and I don't want to do that anymore, especially when it comes to music and trying to fit into a box that people have set up for you.

“This album is about me letting go and accepting that not everyone is going to get me. I don’t even want to be easily figured out anyway,” she furthers, pointing out that the album’s opening interlude-style track, 3, sets the tone for the whole album.

“It’s the hallmark of the whole last three years of putting the album together. The lyrics are: ‘when I count to three, let go’ – and that’s all it is, there's no other lyrics. There are so many things that we hold on to through life that we think are positive for us, or what we think other people would want to see in us to make them feel comfortable, but there are so many negative aspects to holding on to those kinds of things. 

"I just hope that it's a song that people can listen to and go, ‘okay, I'm gonna breathe through this moment in time’. I am full to the brim of stories that many don’t have the privilege to hold within themselves; some I know quite well and some live deep in my DNA that I won’t have enough lifetimes to unpack. But the ones I know, I will tell them how I want to, because I can.”