“My music’s always been driven by my emotional state,” accepts Central Coast-based singer songwriter Melissa Bester — or E^st, as hundreds of thousands of listeners already know her. “It’s the way I express how I’m feeling, but just as often it’s how I find out how I’m feeling.” Either way, she says, it ends up being raw. “Very raw,” she adds. “As raw as I can possibly make it.”

In a world where it’s hard to know what’s real, E^st’s opulent pop provides a rare glimpse of honesty. Spearheaded by rebound banger Talk Deep, her debut album I’m Doing It was recorded with acclaimed long-term collaborator Jim Eliot (Ellie Goulding, Anne-Marie, Halsey), and centers on dealing with heartbreak and feelings of isolation and failure. It signals a huge leap forward from EP releases like Old Age and Life Ain’t Always Roses, which drew plaudits from the likes of The Fader and Paper.

In just three words the album’s title makes a bold statement about the defiance, resilience and independence of this exciting new artist. Just recently 21 — there’s also the sense of things finally fitting into place, especially as this dynamic tunesmith has also become an in-demand writer for other artists, from global concerns like Noah Cyrus to acts from back home like Nicole Millar. In short: she’s doing it. She’s finally doing it.

Mel Bester’s early life was a little disjointed— she was born in South Africa, where her earliest memory was stepping out of a car and coming face to face with a giraffe, but she moved to Australia at age four, followed by frequent further moves between Dubbo, Sydney and Tamworth. She was homeschooled by her mother, a drama teacher, who was endlessly supportive of Mel and her sister and brothers. “It was a very loud household,” she says today. “To be honest our neighbours probably hated us.” Back then Mel, naturally introverted, felt homeschooling suited her fine; as she got older, she wondered if it was the cause of, rather than the solution to, social awkwardness: “I found it difficult to be the outsider. I was uncomfortable with myself — I felt I needed to be bigger, and funnier, and louder, to work in social situations. But I also knew that wasn’t being genuine.”

Throughout, music had been a welcome distraction. At age eight, she was spotted singing at a local event which later led to being spotted by a music manager who guided her through a brief spell as a pre-teen trainee popstar. Experiences that led her to realise she absolutely needed to write her own songs.

This meant becoming her own person, exploring her passion for fantasy, poetry and storytelling. The arrival of a red acoustic guitar on her twelfth birthday allowed Mel to combine all those passions with music — something she did so effectively that after she sent demos to labels she’d randomly found on Google she ended up flying to Sweden for a six-week writing session. Which eventually led to a ten-week trip to LA to write and meet with labels. “Being 14, not being very comfortable with myself, and having to go into these huge companies with my little acoustic guitar, was brutal,” she grimaces. Just as she thought she was getting somewhere, changes at the label meant Mel Bester ended up back home in Australia. “It was a massive blow,” she recalls. “You have people around you telling you you’re awesome, and you start to think: maybe I am. Then something like that shakes up your self-belief.”

On the other hand, she had a secret weapon — “I’ve always been way too stubborn to let something like that get in my way. My stubbornness has been my saving grace so many times.” She took time out to “just be a teenager for a while”, then flung herself back into music, noticing her music taking a more folky tone and absorbing influences like Joni Mitchell and Imogen Heap. Rather than being in sessions for other people, she was writing for herself: “I didn’t have to write a hit that made sense for someone else. It only had to make sense to me.”

The name E^st was inspired by Mel’s mother’s maiden name Oosthuysen — oost means east in Dutch. “I’ve always viewed E^st as me but amplified,” she smiles. “E^st as a performer is more bold, a bit more badass… I mean, who doesn’t want to be badass? E^st means I can actually make eye contact with people, for a start. It’s totally me — but it’s a different way of being me.”

In 2014, when Mel was 16, she self-released Old Age — a song and then an EP of the same name that she’d uploaded to Triple J’s legendary Unearthed site, a song about not feeling as youthful as you think you should. The song struck a chord, and not just with Triple J (who later invited Mel to take part in what would become one of their all-time most popular Like A Version sessions). Before long there was an all-out label bidding war, with one label in particular pulling out the big guns. “Parlophone invited me to this tiny Coldplay show,” Mel recalls, “and I was sipping a mocktail at the afterparty when I was ushered over to meet Chris Martin.” Chris had heard E^st’s music and had some advice: don’t get fazed by which other artists the labels have — just make sure you connect with the people you’ll be working with. “It’s all about the people,” Chris advised. “The next day,” Mel remembers, “I was like: well, I guess I’m signing with Parlophone.” So that’s what she did.

Since Old Age there have been countless gigs, including support slots with the likes of Panic! At The Disco and Twenty One Pilots, as well as a string of further single and EP releases, throwing out standout tracks like Friends (a song Mel wrote for her sister, which has since become a live favourite among fans) and 2018’s memorably-titled Blowjob (despite appearances an intense and rather moving look at intimacy, trust and relationship grey areas). Breakout Australian hit Life Goes On — an early track with “musical soulmate” Jim Eliot — proved to be something of a creative turning point for Mel: “Making this song was so pure and we wrote it very quickly. It was rough and refreshing. I’m such an overthinker and it showed me I didn’t need to be. It felt like a new page at a time when I desperately needed to turn the page.”

Now it’s time for an entire new chapter and one that brings us, in 2019, to I’m Doing It — an album whose story arc takes places after the collapse of a relationship, and which also finds Mel considering issues surrounding anxiety and her own mental health that’ve been with her for her entire career. “The first half of the album is all about being a heartbroken mess as your life falls apart, and it’s wallowing in that with no effort to make sense of it,” Mel reports. “I mean you need to have a wallow — it’s crucial.” The turning point comes in the middle with a song, appropriately enough, called Turn. After that, the songs take on a more upbeat tone. “They’re still dealing with sadness and heartbreak but there’s a conscious effort to do better and be better. The album takes on an optimistic tone as I grow as a person. By the end, the album’s like: it’s okay, I’m getting by, I’m coping. ”

There are artists whose music soundtracks their change into someone else, and others whose music shows them realising who they’ve been all along. You’ll hear flashes of all that in E^st’s own music, but she reckons I’m Doing It channels something subtly different. “It’s about where I’m at right now, and that’s ever-changing,” she explains. “If anything, it’s about who I’m becoming.”