Nobody gave us a handbook. Nobody sat us down at twenty-one and said, hey, this decade is going to wreck you beautifully and then put you back together. We just kind of lived it. Stumbled through versions of ourselves that felt all wrong and loved people who didn’t deserve it. And somewhere in the mess, we started figuring out who we actually were. I’m getting close to thirty now, and damn if it doesn’t feel like the legend says it would, softer, and finally mine. That’s why Molly Millington’s debut album ‘Frank Morgan’ hit me the way it did. Something I didn’t know until recently: the album is named after the actor who played multiple characters in The Wizard of Oz, the Wizard, the doorman, and the professor, a discovery Molly made as an adult that clicked into perfect meaning. Because that’s what your twenties are. A rotating cast of characters, all of them you, all of them fighting for the spotlight at the wrong time. This record is the instruction manual I wish someone had handed me at twenty-two, delivered across twelve tracks of country-pop clarity from one of Australia’s sharpest new voices.
The album opens with ‘Just Drive,’ and it catches you off guard. It says something you’ve felt a hundred times without finding the words for it. Molly wrote this about late-night drives with her mum during a rough stretch in her teens, windows down and music up, sometimes not saying anything at all. Those moments when you couldn’t explain what you needed but somehow the road understood. She remembers that first taste of freedom feeling / big dreams, hard at work / ’til fingers bleeding, and the whole song builds toward the chorus, where her voice opens up into its full top register and just stays there. Wide-open roads and bleached hair, all of it sacred and pure and hers.
I remember when I cut my hair / and felt more like myself than ever / bleach blonde, wide-eyed / with new endeavors. That detail lands. It’s a specific kind of freedom you manufacture with scissors when you need to feel like you’re making decisions about your own life. Molly said this song was inspired by those post-dinner drives with her mum during a rough stretch in her teens – sometimes talking, sometimes just sitting in the quiet of it. That context reframes the chorus as survival. She wasn’t running from something. She was running toward herself. Then the second half lands harder. After all the nostalgia and golden-hour memories, Molly pulls the rug: water slipping through my fingers / I screamed out but no one heard me / I crawled my way across the country / just to have them turn me down. The dream didn’t go exactly as planned. But instead of collapsing, she turns the car back on. All I wanna do is just drive. That’s the whole thesis of ‘Frank Morgan’ right there in one line.
From there, the lead single ‘Your Villain’ comes in with cozy guitar that earns your trust before it guts you. This is Molly stepping into the role of the bad guy in someone else’s story, the wrecking ball, the one his family whispers about, deciding to wear that cape anyway. She confronts a relationship where the dysfunction was baked in from the start, where his dad was drunk backstage when he should’ve been home, and years later there’s a drunk dial from the same barstool. Molly says it herself: “When you’re younger it’s really hard to accept that someone sees you that way. Especially when you know that’s not how it happened.” She smiles. “I put my soul into this, and you still think I’m bad.”
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The brilliance of ‘Your Villain’ is that she doesn’t bother correcting the record. She lets them burn the witch and walks away from the fire. I’ll be your villain, in your made-up fantasy / you’re tearing out the pages where you wrote that you loved me / you’re burning all the witches, you’re setting me alight / just another tale as old as time. Damn. What makes the song land hardest is the family dimension. Your mother still calls to ask me how I am / she says I’m like her second daughter / your sister told me that I wrecked the family / just because I never called her. The contradiction is almost funny. His mother loves her. He’s playing the martyr. And Molly is standing in the middle of all of it watching a man perform the role of the misunderstood hero while she gets cast as the wrecking ball. I must’ve forgot you’re a modern day Jesus / high in the basement, say, you’re medicated. That line is vicious as shit and she delivers it without raising her voice. That restraint is the whole point.
After all that emotional reckoning, Molly earns the right to be a little bad. ‘Julius’ opens with him exactly where she wants him, young and distracted, high at a friend’s place, talking dirty to some girl on his phone who isn’t her. ” Your mumma’s painting pictures in the yard / I bet you’re high at Jordan’s. “ She’s watching him from a distance and wants to be the one who breaks that rawness open. ” I’ve never seen anything like you. “ That’s her motivation to be his first real lesson. ” I fantasize about you sitting in my bedroom. “ By the time she’s ” standing at the door in lace and leather / I’ve never looked better “ it’s clear she’s been planning every second of it.
” Tell me all the things that make you crazy / and I’ll get right to it. “ She’s giving him what he wants but on her terms and pace. “Keep your eyes on me, don’t you falter baby.” He came over for one thing and left a completely different person. What started as a joke between friends became the most charged track on the record.
She’s not done settling scores. ‘My Man’ comes in swinging with Molly’s most bad-ass Dolly energy, a little sharper and little less forgiving than it’s inspiration ‘Jolene.’ Picture a dive bar and some woman sizing up your relationship like she’s browsing the menu. “She says ‘You’re such a fool for not leaving him at home.'” What starts as wounded pride turns into something quieter and edgier. Molly clocks that her man isn’t exactly swimming away from the attention. She can’t fight. That’s just not her. But she doesn’t need to. “You can have him take him off my hands.” By the end, the power has transferred without a single swing thrown.
Then the record gets quieter and more devastating. ‘Greener Than Me’ floats in on the high end of Molly’s voice and she delivers what might be the album’s most quietly devastating line: “when you left me by myself, that’s when the magic happened.” The whole song is about an ex who left searching for something better and crawled back to find the fantasy wasn’t real. He goes from god to the enemy, because she finally sees him clearly. “The grass ain’t greener, nothing’s greener than me.” She’s just done, and that indifference is the win.
Molly shakes the weight off and picks up the tempo. ‘Girl Next Door’ is a playfully feminist fuck-around-and-find-out anthem with Molly playing a country radio host broadcasting a warning to any man who thinks he can sand a woman down to fit his ideal. ” A man once said to me / I’d make the perfect wife / if I knew my place / and I followed his advice. “ She didn’t. That kind of audacity deserves its own damn zip code and Molly knows it. “If you want the girl next door / you should go next door and get her.” She’s not the woman you reshape. She’s not the woman who quietly folds.
The song doesn’t pretend she’s without weakness either. ” I decided at a young age I wouldn’t let a man control me / but I can’t lie, I give in when he goes and calls me baby. “ That admission is what gives the song its humanity. She’s self-aware enough to know where she’s soft and honest enough to say it out loud and that honesty is what makes this shit real. “There’s plenty of girls out there who will do the things they’re told / but I am not one of them who’ll so easily fold.” He’ll either break her spirit or she’ll break his. Molly’s mother raised her to speak up and it has gotten her into trouble and she is completely fine with that. Up-tempo and sharper than it looks because the humor is completely sincere.
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She lets the record breathe on ‘Lovers Song,’ and it hits different. Molly wrote this about romantic love, but it evolved in her mind into something about friendship, and that shift makes it more moving. “Woke up on the right side of your bed again / loving you feels like finally breathing in.” She writes about letters and walls of guitars and the specific joy of laughing and crying with someone you love. “This must be, this must be love.” Whatever version of love it is, it feels completely real.
And then ‘Empty Handed’ arrives and Molly calls herself out in a way that’s genuinely hard to listen to, in the best possible way. “My mind is a rodeo I can’t control.” She admits the performance-addiction and the craving for applause. “Another rhinestone cowgirl passed out in the bar.” She owns that she pulled someone apart while trying to hold herself together. But underneath all of it lives a confession that lands softly and stays – “I wanna be loved / but not like an idol / I wanna be held / like when I was a child.” The apology and the self-reclamation happen in the same breath. “I feel a little more like myself now.” That’s the whole damn album in one sentence.
But Molly gives us the before-picture too. ‘Cooper, I’m Sorry’ is labeled an interlude but it’s the prequel, the moment that made ‘Empty Handed’ necessary. It’s where she stands in the wreckage of a relationship and owns that she was never fully able to show up for it. She pictures herself as “half a girl” of what someone needed, wishing she could be someone who wouldn’t leave at a moment’s notice, someone who could love them the way she promised. The regret here is specific and quiet and it hits harder because of it. Just those images, and then the title. “Cooper, I’m sorry.” I needed a minute after that one.
Molly has been building toward this for a while. Her 2023 EP earned an AIR Award nomination for Best Independent Pop Release and her stage history reads like a festival bucket list. Influences like Kacey Musgraves, Sabrina Carpenter, and Dolly Parton are woven into the record’s DNA without ever making it feel derivative. Built alongside longtime collaborator Xavier Dunn and mixed by Simon Cohen ‘Frank Morgan’ carries the ease and trust of an artist who has fully arrived inside her own sound.
They tell you your thirties are when it all settles. When you stop auditioning different versions of yourself and just show up as the full cast. Maybe that’s true. But Molly Millington figured something out first, while still deep in the middle of it: all those versions of you were real. The villain and the cowgirl and the girl who just wanted to drive away. Frank Morgan played multiple characters and that was still one man. ‘Frank Morgan’ is the record that gives every version of yourself permission to exist at once. Molly says she made this album for herself and it’s “a pretty selfish record” and that honesty is why it works. “It’s a little bit country, a little bit pop, it’s happy, sad, but always honest. I don’t think you can ask much more of me than that.” She’s right. ‘Frank Morgan’ is what it sounds like when all those versions of yourself finally make sense.
