Whoopee is the second album from J. McFarlane's Reality Guest, the project of Naarm/Melbourne multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Julia McFarlane, out now on Felt Sense Recordings/Night School Records. 

Whoopee presents a stylistic shift from the fractured DIY pop of Ta Da, the debut LP under McFarlane's Reality Guest moniker. This new album instead offers up an intoxicating collection of surrealist pop songs that draw from a variety of 90s/2000s genre tropes, but ultimately transcends into something entirely its own. 

McFarlane and her co-writer Thomas Kernot expertly combine a heady concoction of otherworldly synths, smoky jazz keys and abstract breakbeats that act as a hazy mood board for McFarlane to draw her bittersweet melodies from. The album possesses an intriguingly blurry quality that never feels disorientating, thanks to the emotional resonance of McFarlane's sharp songwriting. 

In an era where so many artists are leaning on revivalism to trade off the nostalgia of past generations, Whoopee merely echoes the past in order to usher you into its strange and compelling world. The end result is a singular statement from one of the Melbourne underground's most unique songwriters.

—