The album got made on the run. Last year Holt was, in her own words, in "a pretty chaotic headspace" - she "felt a bit off kilter", split between hemispheres, "touring, working back home to save the cash to tour again", grabbing "small blocks for writing time" wherever they fell. Four round trips between Sydney and London in twelve months, twenty-four hours in the air each way. Then, at the end of 2025, everything recorded in London in a two-and-a-half-week sprint at producer Tom Stafford's Soho studio, or as she puts it, "with my friend Staf". Chaos fed in, album spat out in the best possible way. "I really leant into a lot of whack sounds and tunings on this record," she says. "But I think it somehow all came together!"

Turns out a long-haul flight is the last place on earth with nothing to answer, and Holt treats leaving home as a writing tool. "Sometimes stripping away the creature comforts of home is a really good thing for my writing," she reckons. The seat-back screen did its bit too. Somewhere over the Indian Ocean she mainlined the Winona Ryder ‘oeuvre’, and it soaked directly into the record like a cultural sponge. Recent single 'Winona Forever', an opener called 'Girl, Interrupted', a whole album lit up as if it was a 1994 matinee screening. "I honestly fell so in love with it. I think there's something so beautiful in the colour grade, specifically in 90s film," she says. "And Winona, well, there were so many characters she played that I could relate to, or that ripped my heart out. Girl, Interrupted really changed me."

A second album often comes with a degree of panic, a propensity to overwrite, and a level of overthinking that sands everything smooth. Holt, cleverly, never gave herself the chance. 'bruises' was carved out of "over 100 demos"; this time she had "about 20", and no time to fret about the difference. "I definitely felt much more focused when I did get to write," she says. "The lack of time worked in my favour."

She wasn't flying solo either. Her wife, Caitlin Park, plays in her band, co-writes on the record, and treats a nearly-there lyric as a personal insult. "There's no placeholder lyrics," Holt says of working with her. "It's like 'let's get this right in the moment and work until it's right.'" 'Gutterball' alone got "laboured over for hours", the pair of them refusing to move until "every single sound and word was purposeful". "She's the best to work with," Holt insists. "It's super inspiring."

There's another shift buried in the new record too. Confessional songwriting has an occupational hazard nobody warns you about - contentment. Get too happy and the well of misery and angst dries up. Holt's answer was to go and raid other people's. "Don't get me wrong, there is definitely still a lot of self-indulgence on this record!" she laughs. "I think I just found it refreshing to chat to friends and see what was going on in their life, because there were so many bigger ideas and things to explore that way."

The guitars have teeth now, too. She's spent years pushing the live show somewhere heavier, and the records have no interest in being a polite version. "It made sense that the songs ended up in this world," she says. "I love grunge music, it makes me move and I really feel it to my bones. I wanted this record to feel like that."

All of which sounds gloriously unhinged in a way that makes perfect sense. The wonkiness is a philosophy, not an accident or error. "I think it's all a balancing act - when I start to feel off balance I know it's because I'm going through an important shift," she says, and the title track hangs on exactly that: the tilt, and the person who steadies it. "This is about knowing yourself, and working out the things and people that make you, you. Ya know!?"

"I think 'bruises' was me documenting pain while I was still in it," she says. "With 'Trapezoid', I'm still writing about complicated feelings, but there's more perspective now. This record I've lived a bit more, let some things go, and become a lot more confident in using my voice to speak up when something doesn't feel right."

What does she want others to get out of it? Nothing you can really chart, but at the same time, the sort of things that really matter. "That they feel seen," she says, "and that the little specific things that they thought they were the only one feeling, are actually felt by a lot of us."

She signs off pointing our way, before running off for her shoot. "I miss you all over on the other side of the world and can't wait to get back so soon and play some shows!"

Hurry up, then, and bring the martini. On this form, total tommy is the sturdiest wonky quadrilateral in the geometry set.

total tommy's album 'Trapezoid' is out 23rd October.