Robert Forster: Strawberries

“You cannot have what you cannot touch / I know it but it doesn’t help me much,” sings Robert Forster during the excellent Foolish I Know – the penultimate song on the Australian’s latest solo release, Strawberries. It’s one of the many pivots The Go-Betweens co-founder takes on his ninth solo affair. The sharpest, arriving on the eponymous track – a playful duet between the Brisbane pop marvel and his wife, Karin Bäumler, which is far removed from anything in the Robert Forster solo canon.

Per the album’s press release notes, Forster spoke of the writing process to Strawberries, and with the themes of his 2023 release, The Candle and the Flame, centred on Bäumler’s cancer battle, so close to home, he didn’t write anything for a year since the album’s opening song, She’s a Fighter. Like all prolific songwriters, though, it wouldn’t be long until the songs came, and on Strawberries there’s an effortlessness indicative of Forster’s best work.

Joined by Swedish backing band, guitarist Peter Morén (Peter, Björn and John), bassist / producer Jonas Thorell, drummer Magnus Olsson, multi-instrumentalist Lina Langendorf and keyboardist Anna Åhman, Forster tears down the template and starts from scratch. Tell It Back to Me, the quintessential opener that glitters from the opening note. While a love song, instead of looking inward, Forster goes the other way, spinning a tale of an English teacher and a French woman that possesses a cinematic atmosphere akin to Before Sunrise.

Strawberries is full of these moments. Evoking similar images to Australia’s east coast as Inferno’s Life Has Turned a Page, the country jangle of Good to Cry is equally built for escapism (“On an island off Mackay / blue birds are soaring in the sky”). Then there’s the album’s bedrock in Breakfast on the Train, which sees Forster at his stirring best. It’s simplicity through song, and played out over eight-plus minutes, another beautiful love story unravels where Forster makes the mundane sparkle like a jewel in the crown – this time the protagonist meeting someone from their past during a day out at the rugby (“No two stories are the same / And love can be a winning game”).

Love remains the central theme on All of the Time – a proto-rock echo of Velvet Underground’s tender moments, while Such a Shame sees Forster taking that tenderness to a different place – the stage lights beaming down as he sits at the piano. Raw and balladeering (“You can look into a mirror you don’t recognise yourself / So you keep on going as somebody else”), it’s one of the few moments where Forster looks inward during Strawberries, and with room for humorous self-reflection (“Well my agent used to tell me / You give people the shits / Why can’t you be like everyone else / Play the hits”.), it’s a song that slowly seeps into the pores.

In the lead-up to the release of Strawberries, Forster said that he “wanted to explode the sound”, and on Diamonds, he accomplishes that feat. A skewed take of punk that mixes heartfelt charm with untethered ferocity, it’s a song that could have ended up on a Crime & City Solution album. And with a line like, “She brought diamonds in my eyes/ Changed the way I saw life”, it’s like something from the Lennon and McCartney scrapbook.

In what has been a modest solo career, he may not capture new hearts but for those who have already had theirs stolen by the strength and gravitas of Forster’s charming songcraft, Strawberries sees the songwriter at the peak of his powers.

Strawberries is out Friday via Tapete Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.