How TAMS/N OTWAY owned her past, shaking it up as a Whiskey Sour

A juxtaposing jab of sweet and sour, the songwriters debut album will leave you with a lingering bite.

Content Warning: The following article has themes of abuse and trauma. Reader discretion advised.

Move over Lana, Chappell and Billie — there’s a new emotional alchemist behind the bar, and she’s pouring her truth straight into your glass. TAMS/N OTWAY may look like a freshly emerging artist, but she’s been simmering for years, shaped by Macedonian hardworking grit and a father who worked nine-to-five and played music in RSLs by night. TAMS/N learnt to fuel her life long passion and turn pain into art. Now she’s arrived with Whiskey Sour, a debut album she insists isn’t a debut at all, but a reckoning — the moment she stops apologising for her voice and finally lets it ring.

TAMS/N OTWAY – Whiskey Sour

Release: Out Now

Listen: Stream here

Hear the latest single and album releases here.

After years of releasing singles, OTWAY hit 2023 with a decision that felt both terrifying and essential: she was going to make an album. Not because someone told her to. Because something inside her refused to stay silent. She admits she didn’t feel worthy of creating something that required so much space and self-belief, but the songs were already there — waiting patiently, haunting the corners of her hard drive, nudging her in the quiet moments. Once she opened the door, more came flooding through. “I had a story to tell the world and a voice to share,” she says. “I spent a lot of my adult life being stunted by the past, but I came to a point where I wanted to leave it all behind. No more hiding. No more pretending. Just owning it.”

Whiskey Sour is that ownership — sweet, sharp, stinging and deeply alive. Like the cocktail it’s named after, it’s a blend of flavours that shouldn’t work together but absolutely do. It’s melancholic and yearning, but also grounded, empowered and pulsing with survival. The album tells the story of a girl who only wanted love but was shaped by a version of it that hurt more than it healed. Those early wounds hardened into beliefs about her own worth, leaving her stuck in cycles of dissociation, dimming a spark she feared might extinguish completely. But it never did — and the record traces how she learns to rely on herself, reclaim her voice, and realise that the love she was searching for had always needed to come from within.

That journey is stitched into every note. OTWAY writes candidly from the experience of living with C-PTSD, navigating grief, processing trauma and clawing her way through the noise of recovery. But this isn’t a sad-girl diary — it’s an emotional uprising dressed in a sonic world that bends and blends genre. Pop, alternative, synthpop, electronic elements, hints of rock, even 90s ballad drama; her voice moves through all of it with a vulnerability and defiance that recalls Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, even flashes of Celine Dion, yet always circles back to something distinctly her own. The tracks feel like late-night confessions over clinking glasses — honest, unfiltered, and devastatingly human.

One of the album’s emotional anchors is “Wallow,” written in lockdown in the tiny sharehouse bedroom she barely left for months. Her window became her escape, framing Northcote skies and sunsets that glowed stubbornly even on the worst days. A bird started tapping at the glass, a small but persistent reminder that the world was still moving, and somewhere deep down, she wanted to move with it. She opened up Logic, used bird sounds and her own breath as samples, and the lyric “I can’t stay, if I do then I might wallow” surfaced like a revelation. The song poured out in hours — a release, a recognition, a promise to herself that she wouldn’t stay trapped forever. The saxophone at the end, she says, “is the sound of my soul cracking open,” and when you hear it, you believe her.

TAMS/N OTWAY isn’t an artist by accident — she’s been shaped by legacy, by resilience, by sacrifice, by the quiet persistence of a dream her family never told her to chase, but never stopped her from running toward. Her TikTok audience of almost 20,000 has watched her grow, falter, laugh, cry and rebuild in real time, while stations like SYN FM have already begun championing her work. Her story is personal, but her message feels universal: you can come from pain, but you don’t have to stay there.

“Singing takes all the sadness out of me,” she says. “Even if all I sing about is sad stuff. It’s the best thing I have for myself. The only thing that really keeps me sane.”

Whiskey Sour is that sanity poured into sound — an album full of ache and honesty and hard-won light, crafted by an artist who has finally stepped into the centre of her own story. It’s bold, bruised and beautifully alive.

And it’s out now.
Go listen, go feel, and let TAMS/N OTWAY show you what a reckoning really sounds like.

To hear TAMS/N OTWAY’s debut Whiskey Sour in its entirety, head here.