Odette on a later-in-life autism diagnosis: ‘It completely revolutionised the way that I exist’

In 2021, just before the release of her second album, Sydney singer-songwriter Odette – full name Georgia Odette Sallybanks – was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. As she said at the time, this threw new light on the songs she had written in the murky depths of constant rumination. She renamed the album from Dwell to Herald – reframing from slippery interiority to public declaration – and threw herself into the promo cycle with more ruthless honesty than ever.

That rawness, and her signature dance between rich vocal runs and loping spoken-word rhythms, has won her fans worldwide, as well as four Aria nominations. Her first two records, including 2018 debut To A Stranger, were released on the major label that signed her when she was still a teenager, and one of the most hyped young songwriters in the country.

The five years between Herald and her upcoming third LP, Blink, would be informed by another diagnosis shattered and rebuilt the picture again.

“Reframing has been the whole purpose of this record,” she says. “And Jesus Christ, my brain is different.”

We’re sitting on a bench in a harbourside park in Sydney, not far from her shared flat. The water is sparkling, the sky is blue; a magpie trots past with a primo shred of golden croissant in its beak, and a delighted Sallybanks stops mid-sentence to congratulate it. She is animated and Zen as our conversation loops between the sunny topics (her girlfriend, the piano, crafting her own stage set out of cardboard at home) and the grimmer ones (genocides, billionaires, Ed Sheeran).

“I’m both relaxed and careful at the same time,” she says. “It’s such a good feeling, in my body: not drinking, just focusing on music and my relationships, and going outside, and I feel like a goddam newborn baby … Colours are brighter!”

In 2024, Sallybanks parted ways with her label and began writing and recording with her friend, songwriter-producer Kiah Gossner.

“I was very mentally ill – I think I was still going in and out of psychosis when we started the album, but the record itself wasn’t necessarily marinating in it. It was lifting me out of it,” she says, describing her creative partnership with Gossner as “one of the most freeing experiences of my life”.

In July that year she released the single Reverence on tiny indie label Beloved Records, and kept writing with Gossner. Then in mid-2025, within a short space of time, Sallybanks got two things: sober, and an official autism diagnosis.

Sallybanks was fine with the news; it was her mother who cried when she heard. On top of historical gaps in awareness of how autism presents in girls, doctors had also been blaming her behavioural issues on racist assumptions about her mother, who is a South African woman with Zulu heritage, she says. “My whole life, she was just trying to get me help, and there was none, and look what happened,” Sallybanks says. “I tried to numb myself in substance abuse – I think that was my way of [masking] – and I ended up in all the wrong places, and it destroyed my body and it destroyed my mind.”

Early intervention is “so crucial to the success of autistic people,” she says – and a later-in-life diagnosis can feel a bit like being handed an Xbox controller after decades of trying to play with a battered TV remote. Sallybanks says that while she can’t change past behaviour she’s ashamed of, or get back the time that feels lost, she now feels like she’s finally “shown up to [her] own life”.

“It completely revolutionised the way that I exist,” she says. “It’s revolutionised my music, my business skills, my friendships, my relationships, everything.”

Musicians who depart a well-resourced major label will often wax ambivalent about the joys and pressures of handling more things on your own. Sallybanks is the first artist I’ve ever heard use the word “mycelial” to describe the process. “It’s like the roots of [an album cycle] extend beyond the creative – organising tours and doing everything that usually I would have had a lot more support with,” she says. This theme runs through the record like a root system: progress through necessary rot, growth that has gnarliness and ugliness to it rather than pink-bud innocence.

Desiccated, wild textures thread through the lyrics – “Alencon lace / all dried remains”; “was I just a briar that your sleeve was snagged on?” – interspersed with contrasting squishes of mud and primordial goo. The album cover, by artist Oscar Davis, is a pyrographic sketch of impossible delicacy on a cardboard panel, ripped corrugated edges visible. There’s something pleasingly perverse about drawing a plant using fire on the remains of other, deader plants, another strange loop, beauty through breakdown. “I used to think there was so much value in whether people were thinking I was beautiful, and whether people thought I was like, sexy and cool,” she says. “And now I feel like I’ve really embraced just being feral.”

Her molasses-rich voice has never been better framed – the spareness of her first two records has relaxed and let life get in through the cracks, with oboes hunting around the edges and syncopated jumbles that had me hunting down old Tuneyards albums for a revisit. (Associated Bandcamp tags and Spotify mix tapes reference “gutter folk” and “trash pop”.)

Her other tic as a composer-arranger are – back around again – circles and loops. On a line by line level she favours these claw-handed little ostinatos, spiky and teasing (like the one that hooks you in from the beginning of her 2017 debut single Watch Me Read You) and I ask if she’s conscious of the habit, or has a name for it. She does, actually. It’s Eric.

“He just comes out and shreds, and then he’s like, ‘All right, bye!’” she laughs. “I wrote a lot of this piano when I was, like, super duper manic. So playing it back and learning it now, in my normal life, is like ‘Why? Why did I do this?” (“Take it away, Eric!” she cries on standout track Seahorses, before, well, shredding.)

Blink also starts and ends on the same note – in a nod to one of her biggest influences, Joanna Newsom, who does the same on Divers – “to pay homage to this idea that we are constantly circling the same idea.”

An idea that Sallybanks keeps circling: that just as she can be both relaxed and careful nobody is ever just one thing. “I’m a woman, and I’m brown, and I’m autistic, and I’m all these things. But I’m talking about being alive. Everybody knows what that feels like,” she says.

“Even the quietest person, we do violence against ourselves – we abuse substances, we yell at each other when we’ve got road rage.” Community and creativity, she insists, can rebuild some of what we’ve lost.

“There’s all this anger festering inside us, and we have all these little outlets [we could use to channel it]… I think that that’s what I’m trying to sing to. We’re all kind. We’re all terrible and kind, and we get to – we decide for ourselves how we want to live.”

Blink by Odette is out 6 November via Beloved Records

Odette’s songs to live by

What music do you clean the house to?

At the moment I do most things to Choke Enough by Oklou. It helps me relax.

What’s the song you wish you wrote?

I don’t really think like that. I really love the song Nausicaa’ by Cameron Winter.

If your life was a movie, what would the opening credits song be?

Ghosts by Japan or Cores by Da Lata – maybe that’s the end credits though.

What’s a song you can never listen to again?

I especially listen to those ones because I argue with my own limitations every day. It’s hard to listen to Cosmia by Joanna Newsom even though it’s one of my favourite songs.

What classic song should be stripped of its title?

I Just Called To Say I Love You. That song is like being stuck in a lift.

What is the first song/album you bought?

The first proper album I ever bought myself I think was Cherry Depression by Beach House. But if we’re going way back to iTunes, probably something by Justin Bieber.

What song do you want played at your funeral?

Excellent question. I want my corpse to do an animatronic strip tease to Angel Of The Morning by Juice Newtown.