“More than ever before, we had time for reflection with this album,” says SAFIA frontman Ben Woolner. “After the success of the first record, we had the benefit of experience and hindsight on our side, and that gave us the freedom to think about exactly who we wanted to be and what we wanted to say as artists.”

That space for self-discovery and creative exploration proved to be essential in crafting ‘Story’s Start or End,’ SAFIA’s remarkable sophomore release. Written and recorded over a span of two-and-a-half years, the collection showcases the Australian three-piece’s bold vision and fine attention to detail, with intricate production and adventurous arrangements underpinning thoughtful musings on identity, growth, and understanding. It’s easy to envision this music on the dance floor—the pulsating beats, window-rattling subs, and atmospheric synths practically defy you to try and sit still—but there’s far more reward awaiting those willing to dig beneath the surface. SAFIA don’t just write songs; they forge entire sonic landscapes with rich, cinematic detail.

“When we’re building a track, we’re trying to create a whole unique world,” says Woolner. “Once we have the spark of an idea, we’ll lay out a very clear visual sense of what that world looks like, and then we’ll make sure that every single element of the arrangement and the production fits naturally into it.”

SAFIA—which consists of Woolner along with drummer Michael Bell and guitarist/keyboardist Harry Sayers—first began transporting listeners to new worlds in 2013 with their breakout single, “Listen to Soul, Listen to Blues.” The track racked up 15 million streams on Spotify, cracked the Top 10 on the Australian Independent Singles chart, and helped garner invitations to support superstars like Lorde and Disclosure on the road. The band followed it up with a series of similarly successful singles before releasing their 2016 debut, ‘Internal,’ to rave reviews, with The Sydney Morning Herald hailing it as “spectacular” and The Australian praising its “intricate textures, whimsical synths and energetic rhythms.” The record landed at #2 on the Australian Albums chart, earned the trio international headline tours as well as arena dates with Twenty One Pilots, and grew into both a radio and streaming juggernaut (to date, the band has amassed over 140 million audio streams and 8 million video views).

“Immediately after we released ‘Internal,’ we were all pretty eager to get back in the studio,” explains Woolner, who shares songwriting and production duties with his bandmates. “Personally, I was determined to make this big, outward-looking album that said all sorts of profound things about the world, but in the process of trying to do that, I started losing sight of what made our music special in the first place. I was trying to say things that I wasn’t ready to say yet.”

It was a heavy revelation for Woolner, who soon found himself scrapping much of the new music he was writing in favor of a fresh direction, one informed by positivity more than cynicism, empathy more than ego, hope more than nihilism.

“I got into a lot of meditation and mindfulness,” he explains, “and I used that time to reflect on what music meant to me. I headed down to the coast to get away from it all, and as so often happens when you’re at your most relaxed, I had a breakthrough.”

That breakthrough came in the form of “Starlight,” a swirling, hypnotic track with heavily auto-tuned vocals that blur the line between the organic and electronic worlds that SAFIA’s music straddles. It was a song born of instinct, captured in the moment without the opportunity to second-guess or over-analyze.

“When I wrote that song, I threw away everything I thought this album was supposed to be,” says Woolner. “I just went with my gut and ad-libbed the vocals in one take, and it ended up becoming this missing link that connected where we’d been with where we were going.”

The rest of the songs poured out of Woolner and his bandmates with a newfound confidence and clarity, and when it came time to record the album, they stuck with the tried and true approach that had guided them from the beginning, performing and producing everything themselves in their native Canberra. While they once again worked primarily out of their own small studio setup, this time around they supplemented those sessions with trips to nearby Australian National University.

“I studied music and sound engineering there, and they have an amazing studio with all this vintage gear in pristine condition,” says Woolner. “There’s nothing like running sound through an electric current to make it feel alive, so once we had all our ideas flowing digitally in our studio, we’d run the elements through the outboard gear at ANU to add presence and depth.”

That presence and depth is apparent from the first notes of “Ivory Lullaby,” which opens the album with an ethereal invitation on the piano. As the song progresses, shifting textures and colours give way to a driving electronic groove, setting the stage for an album that’s all about transformation and equilibrium. The throbbing “Think We’re Not Alone” wrestles with letting go of unwelcome thoughts, while the soulful “Resolution” casts off the shackles of pride and ego, and the infectious “Think About You” blends a hip hop groove and R&B swagger as it seeks to live fully in the present.

“It’s easy to get lost in the future or the past, but the present is the only time that truly exists,” says Woolner. “By the second half of the record, the songs start to come to terms with that, and the music in turn becomes more free and full of wonder.”

The playful “Vagabonds,” for instance, trades self-consciousness for an embrace of individuality, and the psychedelic “Cellophane Rainbow” questions the very nature of reality as we know it over a relentlessly mesmerizing rhythm section.

“We wanted to build these hypnotic beats to anchor each track,” says Woolner, “but we knew that could only work if there was balance between the drums and all of the other harmonic elements. We were walking a very fine line, and if that balance was off by even the smallest of margins, the whole song could fall apart.”

At the end of the day, balance is the heart and soul of this album: balance between the possible and impossible, between optimism and pessimism, between our inner and outer selves. The record concludes with the breezy title track, which finds Woolner musing that “this could be our story’s start or end,” and his use of that plural pronoun is no accident. Life may be an unpredictable journey, but SAFIA want you to remember we’re all in it together.