Hammond commits fully to artistic concepts — her previous video for Hunter Gathered involved dressing as a rodeo clown and freezing for the sake of the shot as she ran through a forest at dusk in winter. Photo: Zach Bowden.
If you happened to be wandering around Coalcliff, Stanwell Park or Coledale over the Christmas holidays and spotted a woman marching purposefully along the footpath in a jacket on a 40-degree day, singing to herself at double speed while pointing an iPhone at her face, no — you weren’t hallucinating. You’d just crossed paths with Stanwell Park singer-songwriter Vyvyan Hammond in action.
That “crazy woman” energy as she puts it is baked right into Hammond’s latest single, Life’s a Party, a joyfully chaotic, deceptively thoughtful track that captures the strange emotional whiplash of modern life — the highs, the mess and the sobering moments when the lights come back on and everyone quietly shuffles home.
It’s also a perfect entry point into the world of an inventive, fearless emerging Illawarra artist.
True to form, the song’s music video was made the hard way. Hammond filmed it herself over two days with her iPhone (and a bit of drone) before editing the whole thing in iMovie. Then she did something most people would baulk at: she split the video into individual frames, printed all 1528 of them on her home black-and-white laser printer, and hand-drew over every single image with paint pens. After that, she scanned them all back in and recompiled the lot into a music video that’s akin to a digital flipbook.
“It was all very scrappy,” she says, with the calm understatement of someone who has clearly accepted that this is just how her brain works.
The filming itself was no less committed. Day one was mild; day two hit 40 degrees. For continuity, she wore the same jacket.
“Deep regret,” she laughs.
At one point near Coalcliff Rock Pool, Hammond filmed herself walking and singing at double speed so she could slow it down later and create an effect where the background drifts dreamily behind her.
“That meant singing at double time, out loud, in public, on a scorching day. I must’ve looked like a crazy woman jibbering to myself.”
The process might seem mildly unhinged, but the end result is hypnotic.
The song that sits underneath the visuals has a very relatable origin story. Hammond wrote Life’s a Party in 2024 after a Middle Kids gig at the Enmore Theatre. The show itself was electric, but it was the moment afterward — the lights snapping on, the crowd dissolving into a mass shuffle out of the room, rubbish strewn across the floor — that stuck with her.
“It felt like a very stark moment that I could capture in a song,” Hammond says. “And I don’t think that ‘walk of shame’ feeling when a party finishes is at all an experience unique to me.”
Hammond wrote 12 songs in total. Collaborator, friend and fellow muso Paul Greene sat down with her and wrote the music in a marathon session. After receiving a trusted vote of confidence from a friend and singer-actor Clare Bowen (Nashville), Hammond took the leap, recording 11 of the songs with Greene in his Nowra studio, for her debut album.
The album happily genre-hops between rock, country, folk and indie pop, mirroring Hammond’s own musical instincts. She’s been making up songs since she was five.
“The idea that I could do music professionally is a relatively new one,” she says. “It was always one of those dreams I had no time, no money or no something-else for, until now.”
Life’s a Party is the fourth track to be released since August last year. These are available for streaming across all the major platforms, and the next, Kiss it, will be released in March.
Visit vyvyan.com.au for more information.
