Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Penny Ivy, Independent 2022.
Penny Ivy is a Brisbane based singer/songwriter and Alien is her most recent single.
Alien has been produced by her long-time collaborator James Angus (Last Dinosaurs, The Veronicas, No Money Enterprise) with the assistance of Tom Megalos who is the front-man for Soap.
It’s a catchy pop track that is well written and performed by Penny.
She’s been writing for a long time, starting as a young girl writing spoken word poetry and eventually songs to express her feelings.
When this developed into a career, she took herself off to Sweden, one of the world’s hot spots for pop song writing, and spent four years honing her craft before returning to Australia in 2018.
Since her return, she has been writing for other artists such as Liyah Knight, Jem Cassar-Daly, Camouflage Rose, KLP, Eves Karydas and more.
Recently she teamed up with James Angus as the core creative team behind UK dance icon Example’s most recent album We May Grow Old But We Never Grow Up where she also featured on a number of tracks including the single Never Let You Down.
Alien is personal to Penny Ivy as it explores her own feelings of always feeling as though she is an outsider.
I’ve always felt weird socially, physically and mentally… I’m not a girl anymore and I feel that I can (now) share these common feelings… and say that it’s okay to feel them and it’s okay to be different.”
Penny has put her Swedish pop experience to good use through writing for the pop, country, dance, and dubstep genres for other artists and now she’s doing it for herself.
Alien contains all the essential ingredients of a good pop song.
It’s got a catchy melody, plenty of musical hooks, and the essential lightness to make it bubble and fizz.
It sounds like its written for radio.
