On Over, Brett Ashby and Queenie Write an Ending That Still Has Lift

Brett Ashby has spent two decades treating movement as a working method. Melbourne-born, with long stretches in New York and London, he became known for performance portraits painted while riding a skateboard, often on a half-pipe, in front of a live subject and a live room. Musicians sat for him. The canvas recorded speed, weight, and the mark left when a body changes direction. Since 2023 he has been putting that same instinct into songs. La Luna arrived first. In Bloom followed. Animals, with Michele Braid-Topcu, opened another lane. Over, his fourth single, featuring Queenie, is the quietest beginning he has given a record so far, and the most public ending.

A half-pipe looks finished from the ground. It is a closed U. You drop in, you gather speed across the flat, and the opposite wall is the only way out. Skaters call the top the lip. From the deck it can feel like a stop. From the board it is the last place you still have a choice. Go over and you are in the air. Stay on the coping and the run dies. Ashby built a visual practice on that geometry. Over is the same shape, written first on a typewriter for Sarah during a hard post-COVID stretch, then handed to another voice.

The typewriter matters because it is the opposite of the half-pipe and still the same tool. One is public and kinetic. The other is private and percussive. Keys strike. A carriage returns. Nothing is smeared after the fact. Ashby has said the pages came without a predetermined structure, thoughts hit before they could be edited into safety. Those pages became lyrics. The lyrics became a song about the moment a chapter names itself as finished, and about the stranger work that starts once you accept the name.

Queenie, the Naarm artist also known as Kill Queenie, is the person who takes the letter out of the room. Her own records, from New Moult through Pleasance, already live in the space between a whisper and a stage. Here she does not decorate Ashby’s story. She occupies it. The first two minutes sit on steel-string acoustic guitar, an arpeggio that keeps time at about 118 to 120 beats, already thinking in 4/4 even before a kit exists. Her vocal stays close, midrange, unforced. Soon to be over works as a refrain with almost no costume. It repeats the way a typed line repeats when you cannot find a better sentence.

Around 2:15 the harmony turns. Purple is my gift is the line that lifts the temperature. The voice goes higher. The guitar stops behaving like furniture. Then the band arrives. Not a programmed four-on-the-floor, a real rock kit: synocopated kick, snare on two and four, hats in eighths, crash and ride opening the last third. Electric bass locks to the roots. Clean and lightly driven guitars fill the sides. Backing voices stack until the last minutes feel choral. Take courage, fly high in the sky is spoken as much as sung. The release is built, not declared.

The lineage is obvious if you listen with the lights on. Fleetwood Mac when the folk bed becomes a chorus. The Cranberries when an acoustic pattern refuses to stay small. Sheryl Crow and Shawn Colvin when a real kit makes adult pop feel terrestrial. Heart and Alanis Morissette when a vocal starts inside the chest and ends with the room. Over does not invent that architecture. It uses it with control. The wait before the drums is the point. If the explosion came at bar eight, the title would be a slogan. Because it comes after two minutes of almost nothing, the lift has weight.

What holds the track together is the transfer of authorship. A song written for one person becomes usable for anyone only when another singer can live inside the sentences. Queenie does that without flattening the origin. You can still hear the typewriter in the pacing, the slightly stubborn way the verses refuse to hurry toward consolation. You can also hear a performer who knows how a last chorus should occupy air. The two registers need each other. Without her, the pages stay private. Without his first draft, her power would have less to push against.

Ashby has always argued that painting, photography, performance, writing, and music belong to one language. Over is the cleanest proof so far, because the method is audible. You hear the small machine first. You hear the large machine later. The title keeps its double meaning all the way through. Something is finished. Something else has just cleared the lip.

Follow Brett Ashby

Over, featuring Queenie, is out now.

Listen: Spotify

Follow: Instagram · YouTube · Facebook · TikTok · Official Site