I’ve been sitting with loss lately. Scrolling through old photos I should delete, keeping things that serve no purpose except to remind me of what used to be. We all do this—clutch onto moments, people, versions of ourselves that already slipped away. So when Jen Lush dropped ‘Wolf & The Dog’ and ‘Black Wing’ back-to-back, I felt it in that specific place where grief lives. You know the one. These aren’t songs you blast at pregame. They’re the ones you put on when everyone else has left and you’re finally alone with yourself.
Adelaide’s Jen Lush has been building a reputation for folk-rock that actually fucking means something. After her last album ‘Hum of the Mettle’ snagged ARBA’s Roots Album of the Year, she could’ve played it safe. Instead, she came back with this double-single that lives in the uncomfortable gray areas—where friends become strangers, where what you’re searching for might already be gone.
‘Wolf & The Dog’ hits first, and it’s this bluesy, lo-fi meditation on that exact moment when everything shifts. Lush describes it as “the dusky threshold where friend blurs with foe, and the known slips into uncertainty.” Guitarist Sam Cagney brought in this haunting riff that became the backbone and the whole thing grew from there with her band, The Field. The title comes from Georgia Blain’s novel and you can feel that literary weight in every line. When Lush sings about that hour where day turns to night, where gold becomes silver, you’re right there with her watching everything change. The imagery of leaves blowing through a house, trouble coming in—it’s the physical manifestation of dread. That feeling when you know something’s ending but you’re still standing in it.
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Then we get those lines about water turning to metal, bronze into pewter, and suddenly we’re drowning. The song doesn’t offer resolution. It just sits in that space between the wolf and the dog—that twilight zone between danger and safety, between what was and what’s coming. It’s the antithesis of Heart’s 1970s cut Dog and the Butterfly but instead of believing there’s value in trying again, Wolf & the Dog refuses the fantasy of ascent and stays in the moment when the trying has become resignation.
‘Black Wing’ takes a different approach to the same damn ache. “Black Wing was born in solitude on a writing retreat, sparked by the loss of a Black Wing pencil and the discovery of a lone black cockatoo feather in an open field,” Lush explains. I love that origin story—how something as small as a lost pencil can spiral into this whole exploration of impermanence. She continues, “A meditation on impermanence and letting go, it was written with an ordinary pencil, in a quietly extraordinary moment.” There’s something poetic about losing the tool you need and having to make do with what’s left. That’s the whole fucking song right there.
The guitars on this one dance more, they punctuate instead of haunt. There’s movement here, even as Lush retraces her steps looking earthward for that black wing. Where ‘Wolf & The Dog’ lives in the moment of transformation, ‘Black Wing’ is about the search afterward. The obsessive looking for what’s already gone. When she sings about being told to let things go but knowing she’s looking for lost things anyway—fuck, that’s the whole human experience right there. We’re all tired, we’re all looking for things we know we should release.
Both songs handle grief differently, and that’s where they really fucking work together. ‘Wolf & The Dog’ is passive, watching the transformation happen—fading love looking for a home. ‘Black Wing’ is active, physically searching, walking on forgotten feet with eyes skyward then earthward. One is acceptance, the other is denial. Both are necessary.
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Lush and her band—James Brown, Paul Angas, Sam Cagney, and Mark Seddon—know how to hold space for complicated emotions. These aren’t clean, tidy songs about moving on. They’re messy and real and they sit with you after they’re done playing. Since her 2018 debut, Lush has released two award-winning albums in three years and performed across Australia. She’s built a whole career on this kind of emotional honesty, and ‘Wolf & The Dog’ / ‘Black Wing’ proves she’s not running out of things to say.
This is music for the 3am moments when you’re too awake and too in your feelings. When you’re caught between who you were and who you’re becoming. When you’re searching for something you might never find but you keep looking anyway.
Stream both tracks and let yourself feel whatever comes up. Sometimes the most beautiful thing music can do is remind us we’re not alone in the messy parts.
