Listening to Shani Weiss’s new single, “What’s Left,” feels a bit like stumbling upon someone’s deeply personal, slightly crumpled packing list before a monumental journey. Weiss, a Melbourne-based folk-rock songwriter and host of Indie Spotlight Melbourne, bottles a very specific kind of pressure here – the internal kind that feels less like a weight and more like a rising tide inside your own chest.

There’s a palpable sense of being squeezed by time, by responsibility, perhaps for someone else’s tomorrow. It’s a familiar knot, isn’t it? That anxiety which makes the air thick, the feeling of needing to fly away, not necessarily from a monster, but maybe just from the sheer, accumulated density of being. It reminds me, strangely, of the silence just before a kettle whistles – pure potential energy, ready to transform.

Weiss navigates this terrain of introspection with a raw sort of grace. We hear the echoes of goodbyes being drafted, apologies offered up like fragile peace treaties, gratitude expressed with the urgency of someone cataloguing treasures before locking the door for the last time. The song traces that specific emotional turbulence of leaving a known home (Israel) for the vast unknown (Australia), wrestling with fear, loss, and the stubborn insistence of hope. It’s the sound of resilience being woven, thread by careful thread, amidst the static of uncertainty.

The folk-rock arrangement cradles this lyrical weight without smothering it. It doesn’t just wallow; it moves, propelled by that almost primal need for change, for breathable air. It carries the scent of letting go, but also the nervous excitement of stepping onto shifting ground.

“What’s Left” doesn’t offer easy answers. It leaves you pondering the things we carry and the things we purposefully leave behind when the pressure demands a different shape for our lives. What residue remains when we finally answer that urgent call to simply… go?

Follow Shani Weiss on Website, Facebook, Bandcamp, YouTube, Instagram