Chloe Violette described her vision for this record to producer Josh Walton in a single image: Dorothy stepping out of sepia-toned Kansas into technicolour Oz. It’s a striking brief, and it tells you something important about what Colourfast is trying to do. This isn’t an album content to sit in the grey. It wants to arrive somewhere warmer and brighter than where it started, and it earns that arrival by spending ten tracks mapping the distance between the two.
The journey is a literal one as much as an emotional one. Violette wrote much of Colourfast during lockdown, shaped between inner-city Melbourne and regional Victoria, eventually trading the No. 11 tram to West Preston for long V/Line journeys into Gippsland. That shift from city density to country stillness runs underneath the whole record, not as a romanticised escape but as a genuine recalibration of pace, place, and identity. What the album captures is what happens inside a person when the external world goes quiet enough to hear themselves think.
“Beginnings” opens with exactly the kind of patience the album intends. There’s no throat-clearing, no grand announcement, just Violette’s voice and the slow gathering of the arrangement around it. The acoustic guitar work from Violette and lead guitarist Isaac Bakker has a warmth that feels earned rather than produced, and Lachy Wyatt’s drums, alongside Josh Walton’s percussion and additional instrumentation across select tracks, provide a steadiness that keeps the quieter moments from drifting. The production throughout sits in service of the songs rather than on top of them, which is the right call for material this personal.
The album moves through grief, heartbreak, and mental illness with a directness that never tips into self-pity. “Skin,” “Road to Recovery,” and “Brave Face” form the record’s emotional core, each approaching inner turmoil from a different angle. “Brave Face” is the longest track at four and a half minutes and gives the subject room to breathe, the arrangement building gradually without forcing a catharsis it hasn’t earned. “Road to Recovery” does what its title suggests without being obvious about it, the melody carrying a forward momentum that the lyrics reflect. These are songs that understand the process of coming through something difficult is rarely linear or tidy, and they don’t pretend otherwise.
The title track sits at the album’s midpoint and functions as its thesis. Folky acoustic guitars, buttery piano, steadfast rhythms, and subtle harmonies come together around a lyric about endurance and graduated resilience. Forward movement here isn’t triumphant so much as persistent, one foot placed in front of the other, colour returning slowly rather than all at once. It’s the album’s clearest statement of intent and one of its most fully realised pieces of songwriting.
“Gin” is a brief change of gear, two minutes of fireplace warmth at sunset, the record allowing itself a moment of uncomplicated stillness before pressing on. At two minutes, it arrives and disappears like a good exhale, and the sequencing is smart for placing it where it does, between the heavier material and the album’s final stretch. “This House” carries its own emotional weight, the connection to place that runs through the whole record, finding one of its most specific expressions here.
Closer “When You’re Well” is the album’s longest track and takes its time justifying the runtime. At five and a half minutes, it moves through several emotional phases, and the extra space lets Violette’s voice do things the shorter tracks don’t allow. Recorded across three locations — New Market Studios, Bellbird Studios in Collingwood, and Gippsland’s Macks Creek Hall — the album carries the acoustic fingerprint of each place, the different rooms contributing to a sound that feels grounded in actual geography rather than manufactured in a vacuum.
Colourfast also marks a significant personal shift for Violette, moving away from classroom teaching toward a life built around music and creative practice. That kind of commitment sharpens the stakes of what the record is trying to say. This isn’t a side project or a casual statement. It’s a declaration of direction, ten songs that justify the leap.
Not every track reaches the same height, and the album’s consistency of tone occasionally works against it, the gentler moments blending together in ways that make individual tracks harder to distinguish on first listen. But the overall effect is cumulative rather than individual, and by the time “When You’re Well” finds its conclusion, the Kansas-to-Oz journey Violette described feels genuinely completed. The colour came back. The album makes you feel it.
B-Side Guys 
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