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Endless Summer sounds like a beach holiday while the world burns. Ten well-crafted pop songs that shimmer like melting highways and drip like strawberry ice-cream. It’s not that Holly Rankin is being flippant. Written just prior to finding out she was expecting her first child, this record is an oasis, something to retreat to amid the apocalyptic horrors of climate disaster – and that was forefront of Rankin’s mind when she came to record the album. “I wrote this album before I became pregnant, but the reality of the ‘endless summer’ we are entering globally has become very tactile for me,” she says. “There is a part of the future growing inside me and it will experience the consequences of all the decisions we are making now. The experience of being pregnant has made everything beautifully and awfully real. I think that sentiment plays out in this record.” Rankin’s previous album, Sugar Mountain – also as Jack River – launched her onto playlists and festival bills with enviable velocity. Beat Magazine called it “one of the greatest Australian albums of the past decade” and single ‘Fool’s Gold’ went platinum. “Sugar Mountain was a place to escape the past and Endless Summer is for escaping our future,” Rankin says. “It’s a beautiful illusion, mirroring what a lot of us feel when we constantly scroll through world news but also get side-tracked by pop culture and shiny things.” When the world shut down in 2019, Rankin became deeply involved in climate change action and then in campaigning for the 2022 election. “I love working at the intersection of culture and politics,” she says. “I was making the album at the same time, which was an interesting mindset shift, but it pushed me to make it more dreamy. Instead of writing a protest album, it’s come out like a magical Beach Boys ride.” If you consider that the tumultuous Sixties produced records that became psychedelic portals into which to escape, the world-building of Endless Summer makes perfect sense. A central suite of songs – ‘Real Life’, ‘Lie in the Sun’, ‘Endless Summer’, ‘Lucy Sea Queen’ and ‘Honey’ – create a fantastical utopian world. Jack River is the avatar up front, with a voice is so sparkly and sugary as to almost be synthetic – and that’s down to her love of late-90s, early-2000s pop. “That era was hyper-real and persona-driven,” she says. “I remember thinking in wonder as a ten-year-old that actual humans write these songs. It seemed crazy that you could create this whole other world that didn’t have anything to do with the complicated real world.” Rankin worked with different co-producers on Endless Summer: Konstantin Kersting; Xavier Dunn; Josh Fountain; Edwin White; Joel Quartermain and Lewis Stephenson, but mostly Matt Corby. Rankin would turn up with immaculately structured songs, lyrics all written and a clear production vision, but she’d also go with the flow. “Matt is a freak at all instruments and a psycho-perfectionist, but he’s also highly experimental. It was magic to bring a vision in and then watch him open up a million doorways within it,” she says. The single ‘Endless Summer’ was co-produced with Corby, co-written with Matt Mason from DMA’S, with guest vocals from Genesis Owusu. “Mason started playing a verse and I was in love with it instantly,” says Rankin. “It’s romantic and summery, with dreamy little butterflies flying around. It was really fun to create.” Countering the suite of beach bangers are moments of reality: ‘Nothing Has Changed’ laments dreams turning to dust at the advent of the pandemic. There’s the bitter-sweet romance ‘Lie to You’; and most poignantly, the kaleidoscopic ‘Stranger’s Dream’. “It’s like the exit door of the album,” Rankin says. “I really love that song because it's honest. I’m singing more naturally. I really do feel like I've been living in a stranger's dream and it's a weird feeling – a kind of impostor syndrome, but for people who have gone through grief.” “I’m six floors high in a stranger’s dream / And everybody’s looking round for me / I’m too in love to let it go / I’m too far gone to let you know”. Rankin is referring to the death of her younger sister and the life path it has taken her down, explored in depth in Sugar Mountain – the writing of which she thinks broke a spell of secrecy around grief. But now it was time to really wake up. “There’s a period when you realise that you've just been surviving for 10 years,” she says. “You have to think, okay, if that hadn’t happened to me, what would I have been doing? Maybe there’s a whole other life I need to live.” And that’s the paradox of Endless Summer. The oasis is a mirage, only as real as you desire. Finding the balance between escapism and real life is something Rankin is facing in every facet of her world: in music, in activism and now as a parent.