Premiere: Ofri Reveals Dynamic Debut Album, ‘That Heavy Magnetism’

Sydney’s very own, Ofri, is set to enchant the music world with her debut album, That Heavy Magnetism, dropping this week. After years of pouring her heart and soul into her music, Ofri is finally ready to share her unique sound with the world, and we’ve got the exclusive first spin for you!

This album is a journey through Ofri’s life, brimming with personal growth, deep intimacy, and even a touch of existential pondering. It’s a beautiful blend of 90s Art-Pop nostalgia, Lilith Fair vibes, and a sprinkle of freak folk magic—truly a sound that’s uniquely Ofri’s own.

Ofri made her grand entrance earlier this year with her debut single, Body, which captivated listeners and set the stage for her album. She kept the momentum going with follow-up singles Painting By Numbers and Candy, each offering a glimpse into her enchanting world of chamber folk.

With That Heavy Magnetism, Ofri has crafted an album that’s both expansive and intimate, filled with raw vulnerability and artistic brilliance. It’s a must-listen for anyone looking to dive into a rich, musical experience that’s as thought-provoking as it is mesmerising.  So plug in your headphones, hit play, and let Ofri’s magnetic charm pull you in!

To celebrate the album further, Ofri has offered and exclusive track by track walkthrough.

Redshift

As the opener, Redshift is both framing device and thematic introduction. It’s sonically quite distinct from the rest of the album with its vocoders and swirling electronic textures, but the images and ideas of expansion and collapse, both personal and astronomical, are a through-line across the rest of the track list. Redshift is the physics term (can you tell I’m a nerd?) for the stretching of light from objects in space that are moving further away from us; as the universe expands, everything shifts redder. To me, the song is like a deep breath before a plunge. 

Souls

Souls is about destiny, doubt, and the overwhelming desire for closeness – to be so intertwined with someone that you become one entity. Like many songwriters who have tried to write about love, I struggle to distill that feeling into music. So, Souls ended up morphing from a love song into a song about the transience of relationships and of the soul (which I’m still not entirely sure that I believe in).

Body

Body is one of the first songs I ever wrote, and the source of the album’s title, That Heavy Magnetism, an image that, to me, captures the gravitational push and pull of people who share a deep love for one another. Together, Souls and Body make up the first song-pair on the album, both born of intimacy in the face of fearful existentialism. On a less abstract note, I absolutely love the horn arrangements on this track, which were written with my long-time mentor and friend Emily-Rose Sarkova, who also wrote the string arrangement on Painting By Numbers. 

Slow News Day

If Souls and Body are the first song-pair, then Slow News Day begins the second, treading similar ground to its counterpart Painting By Numbers. These songs are a reckoning with a frustration over a lack of time, and that nagging, irrational fear that the world is stacked against you. Slow News Day is also an obligatory tip-of-the-hat to my background as a jazz singer, and – being heavily inspired by Tori Amos’ Mr Zebra in particular – it’s also a love letter to the wonderful quirks of the alternative singer-songwriters I grew up listening to.

Painting By Numbers 

Painting By Numbers happens to be the first song I ever wrote that I was happy with. Ironically, it’s about writer’s block. Picture a version of me from five years ago, playing around with all these mixed-metre rhythmic patterns to try and force something out, hence the title. Somewhere in between writing the opening lines and the chorus, the tone really shifted from this quite playful look at the art-making process into something more fatalistic. This was definitely the birth of what would become a songwriting obsession of mine: silly little ditties with existential undertones. 

Go Gentle 

Go Gentle is, above all else, a pep talk. I have this ambient fear of running out of time, of letting it slip out of my hands before I get to do everything I want with it, which is probably already clear given the previous two songs. A lot of that fear comes from a chronic injury I’ve been dealing with for almost five years, which kept me from making music for a long time. At the peak of that injury, I couldn’t play piano for longer than two minutes without being in pain for hours, or even days. I really struggled with the fact that I couldn’t write or play, and not knowing when or if I would be able to again. When I could finally play again, I wrote this song to quiet the part of me that struggles to take things as they come, giving myself permission to go gentle. 

Tracks

Every so often, there are people we know who we, for one reason or another, hope to never see again. If you’re like me, that means you’re forever cursed to run into them – on the train, in a bar, wherever. It’s almost never really them, but maybe it’s someone with the same hair or eyes who looks uncannily similar from the other side of a train carriage. I wrote this song right after seeing someone like that, in that acute pain after a hollow reminder of a shitty spectre from the past. Around the time of writing this song, I found myself saying “tracks” whenever something unsurprising happened, so the title of this song is half inside joke and half terrible pun about train tracks.

Brittle

Originally an intro to Candy, I was far too happy with how well this little string-led moment turned out, so it gets to be its own standalone interlude. Rejected title alternatives included: rock, toffee, saccharine, sweet, hard (eww), and syrup.

Candy

Trust is something I tend to give out easily, but once that trust is betrayed, it takes a lot to get it back. I wrote Candy during the long and arduous process of healing a broken trust and building it back up anew. It’s about the realisation that this newfound trust has to go in two directions: “I trust you now” and “I choose to trust me more.” It’s a belter, so it’s incredibly cathartic to sing, and I had a lot of fun writing the lush string arrangement that makes it sound just as big as it feels to me.

Bird Song

What is this, another pep talk? Apparently, I need a lot of pep. In each of Bird Song’s verses I am a different kind of bird – a coal mine canary, a messenger pigeon, a sentinel chicken. These birds each have a gargantuan purpose that looms large over their little bodies, and I feel a kinship with that contrast. This idea of having to sacrifice a part or whole of yourself to something bigger is about as close to religion as I get, but I think as far as quasi-religious ideas go, this one is quite good. It’s a track that feels powerful to sing and play; it’s all about resilience and defiance in the face of everything life throws at you.

Blueshift

The obvious choice when you have an album-opener called Redshift is to write an album-closer called Blueshift (I’ve never claimed to be unpredictable!). Together they make a neat little jacket, a coat with which to drape the rest of the album (so it stays nice and toasty through the winter). If Redshift is a deep breath in, Blueshift is its mirror: an exhalation out into some great expanse.

Ofri’s wonderful debut album, That Heavy Magnetism is available tomorrow but you can listen right here exclusively today!