Airling On Finding Her Way Back To Music
After eight years away, Airling returns in 2026 with new EP, Retrieve. Talking over Zoom, Hannah Shepherd opens up about making music, the realities of touring and her career as a nurse.
Words Emily Wilson // Image supplied
Eight years away from the spotlight can change a person - this is definitely the case for Brisbane’s Airling.
“I guess I’m a bit older, a bit uglier, a bit wiser. Maybe,” Hannah Shepherd, the mastermind behind Airling, discloses soberly over Zoom.
Shepherd first found an audience with the release of her debut album, Hard To Sleep, Easy To Dream, in 2017. The project earned her the coveted Feature Album spot on triple j, as well as winning the triple j Unearthed competition for Splendour In The Grass and thus performing alongside Vance Joy, AURORA and M83, playing at Laneway Festival and recording for Like A Version. With early success came pressure and expectation, and, overwhelmed and lost, Shepherd decided to step away and pivot to nursing. Now, she is back, with her soulful new EP Retrieve. It is a project that is allowing her to heal her relationship with music.
“I think I really had a fever-drive when I was younger and making music, and now it feels more natural, I guess,” she says. Music has always been a part of her, after all. “I’ve been singing since I could talk. My grandparents told me I wouldn’t shut up as soon as I could use my voice.”
She confesses that when she released the first song off the EP, ‘Mona Lisa,’ she “couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I felt anxious. When you make a song, you spend hours on it. People don’t even realise how much time goes into the writing and the recording and the release. And then, once it’s out, I kind of dismiss it, like, it’s away from me now. It feels better if I can just let it be its own thing in the world.”
Excitement builds before a release. “But then it kind of just happens. You think that it’s going to blow up, but it really just is a slow slog, you know. It’s so tough out there.” (She discusses, for example, the fact that she currently cannot tour in the near future. “Unfortunately I can’t fund it with my band at the moment.”)
The fact that music can be such a “slog” is a fact, however, that she is now more at peace with. “It is what it is. Maybe that comes with age. I’m not sure. But when I was first doing the Airling project, I really wanted it to be the be-all and end-all, I wanted it to direct my life. And unfortunately it didn’t. But at the same time, music is a gift to me. I’m lucky that I can sing and write, and I just had to nurture that a little bit, because it wasn’t feeling great. But now it feels really nice.”
Shepherd kept “music on the back-burner” for a long time. Since releasing her first album, she has been working constantly at a hospital, and music was no more than a hobby. “It’s been nice, but I missed it so much, you know? Hence this EP. I just couldn’t stop!”
She is, however, still passionate about her occupation as a nurse. “It’s definitely given me a lot more perspective on life. When you go to work in the hospital, you leave your ego at the door. You are looking after people who are in pain, people who are sad, people from all walks of life. I needed that, and I love that kind of work. So I think that’s helped me a little bit. I think I just appreciate humans more, and the struggle of life and mortality and pain - it’s universal and it’s awful, but there are ways forward. So I guess I use music as a release to try to process what’s happening in the world and in my body and to other people.”
Music, for her, provides total catharsis. “Music has always been like a kind of medicine.” She says of songwriting, “It’s just so fun and exhilarating, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s the most beautiful part of making music.”
Music is perhaps so medicinal and cathartic because she only writes when she truly has to. “I don’t write if I don’t feel it. I’m working on my impulses. It’s not like I’m a trade-writer and every day my job is to wake up and songwrite.” The EP is composed of both songs that she wrote in a day and songs that took her years to write.
Shepherd’s voice shines on Retrieve; her talent is undeniable. But nerves are still persistent. “I’ve been out of the industry for so long,” she says. And it isn’t an easy industry to try to find your way back into. “Honestly there’s so much goodness and so much creativity coming out of Australia, I just think there’s not enough outlets to handle it, there’s not enough ways to support artists.” She shrugs. “But I don’t have any answers.”
Shepherd shouldn’t need to make time to find the answers - time making the music she creates is time well spent. And hopefully, as she continues to write and create and nurse people back to health, in the hospital and in the studio, someone will find the answers soon.
Airling’s Retrieve EP is out now. Listen here.
