Rowena Wise writes the footnote love forgot

Bad Things Feel Good* unpacks non-monogamy, mental health and the slow unlearning of certainty — asterisk included.

Told by Paige Turner · 5 October 2026

Rowena Wise has made an album about the slow, uncomfortable work of unlearning what you thought love was supposed to look like, and it's the asterisk in the title that tells you she knows exactly what she's doing.

Bad Things Feel Good* — released 7 August 2026 on Bandcamp — is ten tracks of raw, live-band arrangements and candid lyrical surgery, tracing what Wise calls "the emotional fault lines of love, identity and mental health" with the kind of clarity that only arrives after you've stopped pretending everything is fine. The album explores heartbreak, estrangement and what she describes as "the quiet unravelling of selfhood", portraying love as a shifting mosaic where certainty no longer applies.

The asterisk is the tell. Wise explains it as hinting at an imagined footnote: bad things feel good, with the exception of a very long list of things… It's a wry structural joke that undercuts the phrase while deepening its meaning, because of course heartache aches and alienation isolates. The footnote you're meant to imagine is the album itself.

And the album does the work. 'Sum Of Two' opens with I feel you holding me tight / But I don't know what I want, a line that refuses to resolve into either commitment or breakup, holding the discomfort of not knowing in your mouth for three minutes fifty-four. 'Unlearning Of Love' goes further, naming the thing polite songwriting usually skips past: Compersion for companions / For community, and for the world / I feel it, I can't contain it / I let my fingers slowly unfurl / Don't wanna hold my cards / Close to my open heart / To love you unpossessed. Compersion — the opposite of jealousy, the pleasure in a partner's other joys — is not a word you hear in Australian alt-folk, and Wise doesn't explain it, she just sings it as the emotional fact it is.

This is an album about non-monogamy, mental health and the addictive intensity of being alive, written by someone who has done the reading and the therapy and still doesn't have all the answers. Wise is a Naarm/Melbourne-based singer-songwriter; the album was written, composed and performed by her, with additional performances by Jess Ellwood, Richard Bradbeer, Matt Dixon, Rob Muinos and Didirri Peters, and produced by Muinos. The production is spare and the lyricism is not: these are songs that name estrangement, fear, compersion, absence, the slow unlearning of possession, the weight of love as an anchor crushing you from above.

It's the kind of record that treats love as a practice you have to keep failing at in order to do better, and it refuses to pretend that doing better feels good all the time. The asterisk stays.