On Ok, ok now, Noah Hill Shows Us Heartbreak Feels Good In Music Like This
By : Josh Kitchen / September 9, 2026
What if, after going through a breakup, you not only had to sit with your feelings of heartbreak, confusion, pain, and denial, but also decided to share those feelings with millions of people? And what if, to really drive the point home, you put actual voice memos from your former partner on the record itself, allowing the audience to sit with you in those feelings of introspection, memory, and loss? An insane way to find closure, right?
Well, that's exactly what Noah Hill of Parcels did on his very first solo record, the first solo release from a member of the Australian electronic pop band. On Ok, ok now, Hill bares his soul in ways few artists are willing to. At times, listening to the album feels almost voyeuristic, like you shouldn't even be hearing what you're hearing. Yet in Hill's openness, a work of genuine artistic integrity emerges.
It's no accident that the album's tracks, often acoustic and sparse, occasionally evoke the Afrobeat-inflected grooves of albums like Paul Simon's Graceland or the work of Peter Gabriel, while sounding markedly different from the upbeat psychedelic dance music Hill's fans have come to expect from Parcels. It's within that contrast that Hill found the freedom to experiment in this deeply personal way.
As Hill reflects on the record in our conversation, speaking from his hotel room in Budapest before a Parcels show, he tells me that making the album has helped him move forward from such a devastating breakup: “It’s the only way I know how to do something like this.”
On Ok, ok now, Hill proves that sometimes, by showing us his heart, it's the soul of the artist that shines through.
This is a very intimate and personal album. How does being in a band like Parcels, where a lot of your music is so up and loud and tonally very different from the record you’re putting out, affect that dynamic? Talk to me a little bit about that.
Noah Hill:
It’s been an interesting journey. It’s something I’ve been reflecting on a lot recently because I’m now again on tour with the band. I’m in Budapest with some shows with them, and our set—just being in the band—is all about energy and dancing and euphoria.
I’ve been working on my solo live set for the months previous and playing those shows for the first time, and the experience is just so radically different. After my solo show, I was just so drained and fatigued and emotionally spent. I just wanted to cry because I felt like I put everything I could into the show, whereas with the band I come off and I’m like, “Woohoo! Let’s have a cigarette. Let’s have a drink.” It feels like you’re at a party.
So it’s a really different space to live in emotionally, and I think why I ended up landing on this style of music, and why I ended up creating this record, is because there wasn’t the space for it in the band, really. There’s just so much different stuff going on inside the band. So many different songwriters, different ways and dynamics in which we create music, and the way that it works and has worked for us as a group just didn’t cater for a deep emotional record or download or expression like this has been. I’m realizing there’s actually a deeper level of unconsciousness where I needed to balance the scales of just not being able to express myself as much as I would have liked in the band.
Right, that energy you describe from playing with Parcels - it's like only one half of human emotion. And when I hear this record, it's like you’re opening your heart up to be exposed. As a listener, it’s a very rewarding experience, and it’s almost like I’m hearing things I shouldn’t be hearing.
Noah Hill:
I’m glad you say that because that’s what it is for me. The artists that I really loved and that inspired this record give you that feeling where you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s so personal,” that you feel like you shouldn’t get privy to it. I think the first song that comes into my head is this Lizzy McAlpine song— she’s talking about sleeping with somebody and looking up at this person and thinking about somebody else. I think that’s maybe something that a lot of people have experienced if you’ve gone through heartbreak or breakups, but it’s something you’re just not sure if you should say. It’s such an inner thought. We’re hardwired -
To keep these things private.
Noah Hill:
Exactly. It’s been tough, honestly, to overcome that because when I made the record, I didn’t think about it. I was like, “Yeah, cool. I’ve been intimate and vulnerable and open-hearted in the past to an extent in the band. Some of the songs I’ve written were very personal. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. I’m good. I’m good. This is what it should be. I should be as personal as possible.”
And now I’m actually doing it, I’m going, “Shit, was this too much?” But I think it’s good overall, and I’m always grateful for the artists who do that. I never think badly of them. I only admire them. I guess it just takes the courage to overcome that to do it yourself.
There are even these voice memos you've put between tracks that make you feel that a little bit more. If you thought you weren’t supposed to be hearing this, well, listen to this. In a time when we’re so on social media and people can overshare to an extent—I’m not saying this is oversharing, but—
Noah Hill:
It’s close. It’s close.
But I think being confident and putting that kind of thing out there is another great example of the kind of artistic bravery that I think is going to make people hear this and think, “Whoa, this is very special.”
Noah Hill:
The voice notes are really something that were done right towards the end, when the record was just being completed. I sort of had all of the songs together, and I was just a little bit like, “Hmm, it hasn’t gone all the way with what I wanted it to be.” It was like, “Yeah, it’s this breakup record about this person. All these songs are leaning in that vein.” But when I got the voice notes, I was like, then it really felt like I had just hit the nail in really hard. Now it’s obvious. Now it’s clear. Now it’s real. It couldn’t get closer to it than that.
And these are her voice notes that she had sent me over the years, and little moments that really captured the relationship—that’s the thing that makes the record, to me, feel like such a beautiful timestamp of that relationship and that time. I’m even using the voice notes at the shows at the moment and playing the record in its entirety from start to finish. When you’re in this space of a couple hundred people and that voice note is coming through the speakers, it all of a sudden turns this room into this super intimate space.
And I imagine people are looking at each other.
Noah Hill:
Totally. Everyone’s just like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” That’s part of what made it really tiring and intense to play those shows, because I created this—I tried to, anyway, and I hope I did it well enough—space that felt so intimate that it was like me and her were sitting inside of it. Some friends of mine had even come to the show, and they were like, “Whoa, it felt like she was in the room,” even though she wasn’t. So, yeah, it’s been an intense journey.
Do you think putting this out, kind of exposing a personal relationship ending this way, has helped you personally move on in a way that you think you couldn’t have done before? Was this part of your healing process?
Noah Hill:
Yeah, I think it was. It’s the only way I know how to do something like this, and I think it’s taken me making it to get over it. It’s why it’s taken such a long time to get over it, because it’s taken a long time to make. But at the same time, it also sort of holds you in place as well. The making of it has prolonged the journey of overcoming the heartbreak and the breakup generally. I was immersed in the world. I’m going deeper and deeper into the feelings. I’m pulling on the voice notes. I’m recreating. I’m making the music videos. Everything is energetically being piled onto this feeling and maximizing it and juicing it out in every single way.
So it sort of intensifies it in some way. And then you go play the shows and you’re singing the songs every night, and you’re getting yourself into that feeling every single evening. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Sometimes I’m like, “Why didn’t I just make a record about something I don’t care about? Maybe I will for the next one.” I think about someone like Cameron Winter’s album or something, which everybody loved, and there’s all these lines like, “Until the conga line behind me is a thousand chickens long,” whatever. You’re like, “What? What the hell does that mean, dude? That doesn’t mean anything to you or to anybody.” But I think it’s interesting.
You can have outstanding records that are done either way. But this record would not have been this good if it wasn’t real like this. It’s easier to bullshit a record that doesn’t mean anything, I think. I feel like maybe the worst albums come from people who are checked out and are trying to just get out of a contract. “I’ve got to just do one more, and then I’m out.”
Noah Hill:
Yeah. I mean, it’d be interesting to hear and know some records that happened under that. And then there’s always that irony where a label really is asking for some song because they need a song, and then the band writes this song. It’s like, “Yeah, whatever. Here’s this shitty little song that you want.” They put no effort into it, and it gets massive. It becomes massive. You’re like, “Wow, what does it all mean?”
The last thing I wanted to talk about is I love the album cover. I love the idea of having to create a visual representation of everything on this, because the listener has just spent so much time in the world, and then you see this cover of you in the water. Are you sinking? Are you swimming?
Noah Hill:
Yeah, the image that I had in my head when I had finished the record was always me sinking in clothing, just drowning. The feeling of the relationship ending is that drifting, sinking feeling. There’s a desperation in it, but at the same time, you’re floating, and it’s ocean, and it’s calm and beautiful and serene, but it’s sort of disastrous as well. So it’s trying to visually represent that.
Also, we just spent so much time on the [Australian] East Coast, and we both grew up in this small town together—and we spent a lot of time in the ocean and just playing in the ocean together. Being in the ocean was like a desperate need for her. If she was ever not by a beach for longer than a month, she’d start to sort of wig out, and I was a bit the same. So the ocean really connected us a lot, and then it all just kind of came together in this sort of end of us just drowning in it.
I think, for a lot of people this might be an album of healing in certain ways. The great thing about this record is you’re showing people that you go through this stuff too. People who listen to you are going to hear it and think, “Well, man, I’ve felt these things. Wow, I feel kind of heard and seen.” Maybe it’ll be a balm for people.
Noah Hill:
Yes, exactly. I think that’s what these records always are. It’s something to turn to when you’re going through that as well, and it can be soothing. I just watched a video, actually, about the science of heartbreak, and it physically lights up the part of your brain that is the same as pain. It’s the same as getting burned or breaking a bone or whatever, if you look at scans of the brain.
All of the traditional parts of a breakup—sitting in it, having to go into it, then needing separation, all of the things that your friends would recommend—are all sort of backed by science. You actually need to go into it. You actually do need to listen to music about heartbreak during a heartbreak because it allows you to overcome it. It’s just part of the process.
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