Australia’s next big pop moment has arrived, and she’s got something to say about love, self-possession, and why staying stuck waiting for someone who isn’t sure is so last season. We went exclusive with the Sydney rising star making noise on her own terms.
There’s a certain kind of Australian confidence that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need to. It just shows up, fully formed, a little cheeky, completely unbothered and leaves you wondering how you only just heard of it. That’s Tia Brittany in a nutshell. The Sydney-based pop artist has just dropped the official music video for DTF, the title track from her debut album, and despite what you might assume from those three letters, the acronym stands for something far more interesting than you’d expect.
“Don’t Talk Feelings.” It’s a provocative hook for a deeply honest song: one that charts the emotional exhaustion of loving someone who keeps you at arm’s length, who lingers in your thoughts but won’t meet you in the moment. The song is sharp, self-aware, and utterly infectious and the video that brings it to life is something else entirely.
Shot in a single exhilarating day at one of Sydney’s most beloved underground venues, DTF the video is a theatrical, cinematic whirlwind. Multiple versions of Tia herself appear on stage together, circling a love interest played by actor Rhys Sherlock, an arresting visual metaphor for the layered, looping emotional experience of wanting someone who doesn’t quite want you back. It’s the kind of debut visual statement that makes you sit up and take notice.
“Seeing all the different characters up on stage together felt quite surreal. It was one of those slightly weird, full-circle moments where everything you’ve been building suddenly exists.”
Behind the lens, the production is no small affair. Award-winning director Pauline Chan, a two-time AACTA (AFI) Award nominee, Best Director and Best Film winner, and three-time Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard selection, helmed the project. Alongside her: writer/director Daniel Green (The Better Man, 2026), cinematographer Franc Biffone (Body Blow, 2025), and editor Martin Thorne, one of Australia’s most decorated post-production veterans with over fifty film credits to his name. It’s a feature-film team making a pop video, and every single frame of it shows.
Add to that the actor/producer duo of Aileen Beale and Mai Kanhukamwe, and you have a creative collective that operates with the kind of precision and mutual trust that only comes from years of working together. “Working with Tia, while collaborating with the creative team I have worked with many times before, the making of DTF was a seamless and inspiring process from start to finish,” says director Pauline Chan. “Our goal was to bring Tia’s emotional journey to life visually — while celebrating the playful and layered aspects of identity she explores in the song.”
The venue where Sydney’s underground gets its glow Red Rattler Theatre, Marrickville. Tucked into the backstreets of Marrickville’s industrial heartland, just a short walk from Sydenham station, the Red Rattler Theatre is one of Sydney’s most cherished creative institutions. Founded in 2009 by five local artists, this converted warehouse-turned-not-for-profit performance space has always been more than a venue, it’s a philosophy. Named after the iconic red rattler trains that once rattled through Sydney’s suburbs, the space describes itself as a “queer-run creative playground” and it absolutely delivers on that promise. Full PA system, a proper stage, LED lighting rig, a licensed bar, a rooftop garden, and a community of artists who actually run the place themselves. The Red Rattler exists for exactly this kind of project.
It’s hard to imagine a better backdrop for DTF. The Red Rattler doesn’t do polished and corporate, it does raw, theatrical, and real. Its walls have absorbed the energy of some of Sydney’s most important underground moments: alternative theatre, live music, queer events, grassroots activism, experimental performance. The space carries history in its exposed brickwork and its battered stage boards, and that lived-in atmosphere seeps into every frame of the video.
For Tia’s launch night, the live event that accompanied the video’s release, the Red Rattler became something else again. What’s ordinarily a beloved underground haunt was transformed into the stage for a proper pop moment. The crowd that gathered in Marrickville that night were among the first to hear these songs performed live, in a room that felt designed for exactly this kind of emotional, up-close experience. No arena distance. No algorithmic barrier between artist and audience. Just Tia, the songs, and a room full of people leaning in.
“I love performing live because it opens everything up, it’s a much more direct way of expressing what the songs actually mean. The audience really brings it to life in a way you can’t fully predict when you’re writing.”
Two tracks defined the night in particular. Modern Romantic, which Tia describes as “heartbreaking but also quite uplifting at the same time”, held the room in something close to a collective exhale. It’s the kind of song that hits differently live, the kind that travels across a crowded room and lands somewhere deeply personal. But it was London that ignited the crowd. “It just had a really strong energy with the crowd,” she says, with the easy understatement of someone who knew exactly what they were doing from the moment the first note landed. You get the sense that London is one of those songs that already feels like a shared memory before most people have even heard it properly, the kind you sing back louder than you expect to.
And then there was the moment that still gives her pause. The one she describes simply as the moment “everything came together.” Cast and crew, all those versions of herself, all up on stage at once. “It was one of those slightly weird, full-circle moments,” she says, “where everything you’ve been building suddenly exists.” In a warehouse in Marrickville, on a stage named after old suburban trains, something new arrived.
In her own words…
IF ONE OF HER SONGS SCORED A MOVIE SCENE…
“Something cinematic and chaotic would be fun, maybe Charlize Theron smashing a car in a kind of stylish revenge sequence. Honestly, I feel like most of the songs could work over a moment like that.”
That instinct, cinematic, chaotic, and above all stylish, maps perfectly onto the visual world of DTF. The staging turns the messy complexity of unrequited love into something almost operatic: multiple Tias circling a love interest who can’t quite decide, the whole thing lit and shot with the assurance of a feature film. It doesn’t feel like a debut. It feels like the work of someone who’s been building to this for a long time — and has absolutely no intention of stopping here.
ON WHAT SHE HOPES PEOPLE TAKE AWAY FROM WATCHING DTF…
“Leave your boyfriends! I’m just kidding, but the core of it is really about not getting stuck waiting around for someone who isn’t fully sure. Go and live your life. And who knows, maybe by the end of it you’ll have your own album too.”
She’s laughing as she says it, but there’s a real point buried in the joke. The debut album and DTF as its centrepiece, is fundamentally about agency. About the choice to stop dimming yourself for someone else’s comfort. About recognising the game you’re in and deciding you’d rather play it on your own terms. It’s pop music with a backbone, and a sense of humour sharp enough to disguise just how much it means.
ON CREATIVE INFLUENCES AND WHAT COMES NEXT…
“It’s always shifting for me. Both the sound and the visual world are constantly evolving depending on where I am in life. The next album is already feeling a lot darker in tone and theme. I also take influence from whatever I’m listening to at the time, there are so many artists doing incredible work that it naturally feeds into what I’m making.”
Darker. That word lingers. For an artist who’s just arrived with a debut that’s bright, bold, and disarmingly confident, the suggestion of a harder, more shadowed second chapter is genuinely tantalising. This is someone who moves fast and moves with intention and if the creative team she’s assembled around her is any indication, whatever comes next will be built with the same extraordinary care.
For now though, DTF is the moment and it’s a good one. A fully realised debut from an artist who clearly had a vision, found the right collaborators to realise it, and walked into a converted warehouse in Marrickville and made something that deserves to be seen far beyond Sydney. The Red Rattler will have seen many nights. This one felt a little different.
The DTF music video is out now on YouTube. Tia Brittany’s full debut album is streaming on Spotify. Go listen. Then go live your life.
