Being seventeen is a whole ecosystem of emotions: crushes that ruin your homework, friendships that combust over nothing, late-night spirals you hide behind a hoodie the next morning. ‘Inside,’ the new album from Phoebe Huisman, sounds exactly like that—like someone finally saying the stuff she only admits to herself when the house is quiet and she’s scrolling way past her bedtime. It’s messy and dramatic in that relatable way, and so painfully teenage that you can’t help rooting for her. Being a teenage girl is surviving the emotional Hunger Games with mascara, and this album never pretends otherwise.
And honestly, there’s a ghost running through this album — Janis Ian whispering from 1975 like she already knew what the next fifty years of girlhood were gonna look like. ‘At Seventeen’ was the original handbook for feeling invisible, unwanted, too awkward, too everything. Phoebe’s ‘Inside’ feels like the modern sequel. Same fucking wounds, different decade but upgraded with social media, comparison culture, and the pressure to curate your entire personality before you’ve even finished algebra. Janis sang about not being chosen; Phoebe sings about trying to survive not being seen. Same ache, new battlefield.
Phoebe is a Newcastle singer-songwriter who’s been writing since she was ten, shaping her voice around the same confessional lineage she now fits into—Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, Taylor Swift. Her style leans toward honesty over polish, gentle production, and lyrics that feel more like diary pages than performances. She studied music creation and composition through TAFE, grounding her instinctive storytelling in real craft. ‘Inside’ is her self-made debut, written from ages fourteen to seventeen and it captures those years with the kind of unfiltered clarity you don’t get twice. Every girl remembers the first time she realized the world wanted to humble her, and this album keeps that awareness right under the skin.
‘Inside’ opens the album by naming the thing most teenagers never admit: how exhausting it is to pretend you’re fine when your brain is anything but. When she sings “No one can see what you feel in public places,” you feel the performance mask slipping. She delivers these lines with a quiet kind of “fuck it, I’m done pretending” baked in, like she’s finally tired of minimizing her own feelings just to make everyone else comfortable. It’s the sort of honesty that doesn’t need volume to cut.
The whole story sharpens with ‘No Want,’ one of the album’s biggest emotional pressure points. Those repetitions of “no want, no want, no want” is someone trying to outrun their own thoughts and losing every damn time. Her admission carries a raw bravery that feels impossible to fake, especially when she’s spelling out how much it takes to keep your shit together while everyone insists “it’s all in your head.” This is where teenage fury gets sharpened into poetry. It’s raw, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s truth you don’t forget once you’ve heard it.
The song digs deeper as it unravels the exhaustion behind that chant. You can hear her trying to name the way dread builds in layers—the pressure to be normal, the pressure to not scare anyone with the intensity of her feelings, the pressure to “get over it” faster than her brain allows. When she circles that lyric again, it isn’t repetition, it’s survival: a mantra she’s clinging to because everything else feels slippery as hell. And the more she pushes against what she doesn’t want, the more she unintentionally reveals what she does want—relief, clarity, a place where she doesn’t have to pretend she’s fine. It doesn’t glamorize the spiral; it just tells the fucking truth about how heavy it is to carry a mind that won’t cooperate.
‘Hypocrites’ flips the energy entirely: a glitter-pen diss track with teeth. The chorus asks “Where were you then, when I was hurting?” and the obvious answer is: nowhere fucking useful. The way she recounts the story has this “I’m not mad, I’m just finally being honest” vibe—which is always code for “yeah I’m mad, but I’m going to sound fucking calm while I dismantle you.” By the time she’s listing “betrayer, double crosser, two timer,” the whole thing turns deliciously petty in the most justified way. It’s her reclaiming the narrative instead of letting people rewrite her as the problem.
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She lays out the emotional residue without softening anything. Her delivery steadies as she names what was taken from her—time, trust, genuine friendship. With each accusation she’s shedding an old version of herself that tolerated too fucking much. This isn’t about vengeance; it’s about refusing to be gaslit into silence again. There’s a bite to the songwriting, but the power comes from her clarity: she finally believes her own version of events more than anyone else’s spin.
Instead of backing away from the emotional heat, ‘But That’s Not Her’ pushes straight into the insecurity spiral. She lays out the self-loathing with brutal clarity—“She looks in the mirror and is disgusted… she wants to look like a model.” There’s nothing coy about it. She calls herself out the way only someone who’s sick of their own inner critic can—not self-pitying, just fed up with the bullshit stories her anxiety keeps feeding her. Then comes the shift: “But that’s not her, it’s just overwhelming anxiety.” The emotional weight of the album reframes itself here, because she separates who she is from what her brain insists she is. It’s watching someone snatch back the steering wheel mid-spin and refuse to let go.
Then the song widens into a broader truth about girlhood. The pressure to be pretty but not vain, confident but not loud, thin but not trying too hard. It’s all baked into that spiraling internal monologue. She captures the feeling of being graded on a scale you never agreed to. Naming it out loud cracks something open: the realization that the harshest voices aren’t strangers or peers but the twisted expectations girls are trained to swallow whole.
‘Untamed’ arrives with contradictions stacked all over it—stubborn, weird, too much, not enough. She sings it like she’s trying on confidence in front of a mirror, seeing what fits. You can hear a tiny spark of swagger slipping through the insecurity when she names her flaws with zero apology. And when she admits “I’m a dark horse not ready to be tamed,” it’s with the certainty of someone deciding they don’t need to be palatable to earn space.
Here she leans harder into that contradiction instead of smoothing it out. Her willingness to name her own strangeness is her realizing the thing she used to shrink from might actually be the thing that makes her magnetic. There’s a teenage spark of you know what: maybe being strange is kind of hot. It’s a small but significant shift—she stops auditioning for approval and starts auditioning for herself.
‘Not That Lucky’ eases the mood into crush territory—hallway tension, platform-tradie boots, that awkward microsecond when your eyes meet and your whole nervous system short-circuits. She repeats “I’m not that lucky” like a shield she keeps raising so she doesn’t accidentally hope too much. It’s a sweet kind of self-protection, the kind you cling to because wanting something is fucking terrifying when you don’t believe you’re the type anyone looks twice at.
Then comes ‘I See Ya,’ the first real breath of adulthood—the moment she recognizes she has multiple selves and none of them are wrong. “My other self is fun, and weird, and creative and stuff” floats above the production like she’s talking herself into believing it. Honesty that shows up when you finally stop dodging your own feelings makes the song hit even deeper. “Good cop, bad cop plays my thoughts,” lands with a clarity she’s been circling for years.
She dives further into the idea that identity isn’t fixed. She isn’t trying to choose which version of herself is real; she’s cataloging them like rooms in the same house. The confidence slips in through the edges—not loud, but earned. She’s starting to believe she doesn’t have to pick a single personality just to make other people comfortable. That’s growth, in the quietest, sharpest form.
The storm breaks with ‘Nemesis,’ even though the song itself stays sharp. She sketches out her antagonist—the snitch, the provoker, the person who thrives on making her small. She doesn’t embellish it; she delivers the truth with that flat, exhausted tone that says, “I’m so fucking over giving you any more psychic rent.” By the time she hits “Your voice makes my blood boil,” it comes off less like anger and more like a long-overdue exhale.
Underneath it is the exhaustion of having to coexist with someone who feeds off your discomfort. It’s not just that this person hurt her—it’s that they enjoyed it. And in naming that, she cuts the last thread tying her self-worth to their behavior. It’s not a victory lap; it’s a release.
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‘Look At Me’ is the thesis statement—the whole album is about being misunderstood; this song is the thesis statement. When she says “I’m like a deterrent… they run and they hide from me,” she’s not being dramatic; she’s being accurate. There’s a confidence in how she names the isolation, this sense of “fine, if no one’s going to see me clearly, I’ll fucking say it myself.” “Come hit me now, I’m full of the vengeance” bares its teeth.
She outlines the social dynamics that shaped that feeling—the way people back away when a girl stops smoothing her edges, the way being “too much” is treated like a flaw instead of a boundary. She’s not trying to convince anyone to see her differently; she’s done asking for that. The power is in the declaration.
‘Settle Down’ softens the album without deflating it. It’s complicated family love—shared DNA, shared tendencies, shared emotional messes. She approaches it with that “fine, if no one else is going to say the uncomfortable thing, I’ll do it” kind of maturity teenagers never get credit for. As it unfolds, it becomes one of the album’s emotional peaks. She knows she has to grow, even if it means stepping into her own life without permission. It’s healing without bragging about healing.
‘Dancing in the Rain’ is peaceful in a way that almost feels suspicious after everything before it. The calm is real, but it’s quiet—“Running on the beach… the water glistening so perfectly” feels like someone finally letting themselves breathe for the first time in months. She avoids melodrama, which somehow makes the peace feel earned. It’s the kind of contentment you don’t dare name out loud because you’re afraid you might scare it off.
Finally, ‘Photograph’ closes the album by cracking open the memory vault. She rebuilds childhood through snapshots—“running up and down sand dunes with my dog,” “childhood best friend,” moments she didn’t know she’d need later. Those memories aren’t just nostalgia; they’re anchors she’s holding onto during a period where everything else feels unstable. As she repeats “Oh, that’s a photograph,” the idea sharpens: none of these moments were big, but they mattered because they were hers.
She ties those snapshots to who she is now. She isn’t just remembering; she’s reconnecting with the parts of herself she lost while growing up too fast. The simplicity of childhood isn’t something she wants back—it’s something she wants to protect inside herself. It’s heartbreak sharpened into poetry in the gentlest possible way.
By the time the album ends, you feel like you’ve been on the phone with her for an hour past curfew—oversharing, laughing too loud, talking shit about people who absolutely earned it, and spiraling about feelings you swore you were done with. ‘Inside’ is messy in all the right ways, full of feelings she refuses to water down just to seem cool or unbothered. She leaves the awkwardness in, the spirals in, the cringe in—because pretending she’s above it would be the fakest move she could make.
Girlhood is basically the prequel to your villain era, and this album traces that shift with a softness that still stings. If you survived middle school as a girl, you deserve tax credits, and honestly, surviving seventeen should qualify you for even more. She’s just getting started—and the world should probably buckle up.
