RUBY GILL MAKES HER LONG-AWAITED RETURN WITH A TOUCHING NEW SINGLE 'BORDERLINES'
Credit: Michael Ridley
"Ruby's Unearthed debut ('Your Mum') stops you in your tracks and demands multiple listens"
- Nick Findlay, triple j
"Excuse me while I scrape myself off the floor."
- Zan Rowe, Double J
"A somber slice of downbeat indie-pop that serves as a reminder that it's okay to be not okay"
- Pilerats
More than two years after her debut single 'Your Mum', which saw triple j listeners crying through summer, Johannesburg-born Ruby Gill has emerged from lockdown with 2020’s most strangely relatable song yet: 'Borderlines.'
Recorded in an almost-single take in an old Northcote studio before lockdown, the track is a bunch of big words about being stuck in a border bubble, held up by a raw, vintage bed of broken Wurlitzer chords and heavy rhythms. Ruby’s voice is as it always was - enormous.
The song started a few years ago as a letter of sorts to the government, explaining what their “bureaucratic nonsense” actually felt like for immigrants on the ground - and more specifically on a bridging visa, which governments put you on while they ‘decide’ your future. In two deceivingly simple and stripped-back verses, Ruby manages to encapsulate this complex position of feeling like you’re in-between: you can’t really go home, but you aren’t legally allowed in this world either.
This year, the concept of not being allowed to freely move around or being stuck far from home - especially when bad things happen - feels even more familiar after months of border closures and 5km bubbles that have kept so many people from their roots and people.
For Ruby in her foreign land, the nonsense has been made simpler due to being a white, English-speaking person. “No one really knows I’m foreign until I say robot instead of traffic light,” she says, and as such is donating a portion of all sales from Borderlines to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), who work 24/7 to support real families through the ‘nonsense’ of policies and pieces of paper that dictate their legal right to a safe home here in Australia.
The track was co-produced by Marcel Borrack and Tim Harvey (Aldous Harding, Emma Louise) and hints at the slew of music to be expected from the Melbourne-based singer-songwriter in 2021.
Ruby is no stranger to the stage, having performed sold-out tours and festivals in South Africa and support the likes of Lime Cordiale, Didirri and Alexander Biggs in Aus. Ruby Gill is also set to support The Teskey Brothers on regional dates later this month.