Olympia open to ideas, shuns categorisation

As a singer-songwriter who gets a creative kick out of the intoxicating work of poets (Dorothy Porter), visual artists (Jenny Holzer), filmmakers (Pedro Almodovar) and fellow musicians (take your pick), Melbourne's Olivia Bartley, who records and performs dexterous alternative pop under the handle Olympia, worries that the release of her debut album, Self Talk, might lock down her fluid identity.

"The thing that paralyses me now is not being defeated by something, but that people will hold me to what I've made: 'I really like that sound, I really like those songs'," Bartley says. "In Melbourne I'm a bike rider and a car driver, and I'm also a songwriter and a music lover – I get both sides of those arguments."

Bartley is a deep thinker with a self-deprecating touch, able to chart her work without being dogmatic or self-important. Sitting at a Spring Street cafe on a recent afternoon, having stepped out of her wage gig working on grant applications and wearing a patterned orange jacket from an op shop that looked like a vintage uniform – "lift operator," Bartley guesses – the 33-year-old talks about her long journey to today's release of Self Talk.

"I do feel a sense of movement, but I don't think it's towards one place," she says. "I just want to do the best I can with having an idea or a goal and executing it. Your skill levels always change and you'll always see another artist's work that kicks your arse."

Marked by glinting instrumental touches, authoritative vocal melodies, and a shifting emotional gaze, Self Talk sounds intimate but fully formed. If her 2013- self-titled debut EP was influenced by the soundscape of Jim Jarmusch movies, Bartley's aim with the album was to maintain her often complex conceptual framework while creating a sense of identification for the listener.

"I'm always going to be interested in ideas. Sometimes it's going to pay off, sometimes it's not," she says. "I really tried to bring people in, so there wasn't just this wall of abstraction. You want people to be able to relate, but I find it hard to write an 'I' sentence, which is what people like to sing along with."

Self Talk is an album where the song's protagonists often obsess over complexities while missing simple realisations. "The world is full of edges," Bartley sings with mantric purpose on the new wave glide of the title track, and on these songs sometimes those edges flex and sometimes they just snap.

"The album is about the stories we tell ourselves, and the mythologies we create that tell us whether we can or can't do something. You see people's lives totally ruined when they leave behind something that is the infrastructure of their identity," Bartley says. "I'm fascinated by the difference between who you think you are and the glimpses you get as you grow older of who you actually are."