Direct from Primal Park: Kimbra brings her collection of inventive sounds and songs to Australia in July

While a lengthy US tour heads to its home stretch, New Zealand-born New York-based singer-songwriter Kimbra has announced four headline shows in Australia in July.

The dates are behind her third album Primal Heart.

The album gets its title from a lyric in the track ‘Human’ and the two-time Grammy-winning performer reveals that all the songs on the record are about “the different parts that make up the human experience.”

These run the gamut from the wellness of ‘Everybody Knows’ to the ego, greed and envy in ‘Top of The World’.

She explains, “That’s what makes up the primal heart, it’s what makes us human, for better or worse.”

Kimbra’s close bond with her audience was reflected in the way she began to tour before the album’s release.

She was thrilled how her crowd trusted her enough to come to shows based around a record they had not heard before, but which they were adaptable enough to know would take them to an interesting new universe.

Before the album’s release, too, Kimbra set up an interactive website, on which she uploaded some samples and which fans could create their own 30-second loops.

It was, she explains, not only letting her fans familiarise themselves with her favourite sounds “but it was art creating more art, a cool concept.”

Kimbra emerged in 2010 with colourful indie-pop singles ‘Settle Down’ and ‘Cameo Lover’.

But she became a major international name in 2012 with her duet on Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, which won a Grammy and was certified 11 x platinum in Australia.

She followed it up with her own Vows album, which showed she was more eccentric and autonomous than the hit single.

The Golden Echo (2014) was even more experimental, with flashes of electronica, hip hop and disco on some tracks.

She spent two years putting Primal Heart together in her New York studio, alongside co-producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, Explosions In The Sky), among other producers in Los Angeles and New Zealand, including Skrillex on ‘Top of the World’.

Her last Australian appearance was a one-off last year, at Arts Centre Melbourne’s 2017 Supersense festival.

The winter tour, through Live Nation, is at:

Monday July 16, The Triffid, Brisbane

Tuesday July 17, Factory Theatre, Sydney

Thursday July 19, Corner Hotel, Melbourne

Saturday July 21, Rosemount Hotel, Perth