Transitory periods, ephemeral moments, acoustic music from ten years of living and writing and growing up were what characterised Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Gretta Ray’s Liminal Space shows.

In her home city, under the reflected light of a mirrorball in the beautiful Brunswick Ballroom, Gretta Ray stood on stage with just her guitar and piano, playing songs from throughout her career to an enraptured room of her biggest fans, in her first show since 2024 in London.

These Melbourne and Sydney shows were packed, despite being announced quite cryptically via mailing list, Instagram story and her Discord fan server. Liminal Space marked Gretta’s return to performing, following a long and difficult period of illness which she first shared about on Instagram last year. The shows were therefore an incredibly poignant homecoming, a return to live music, to her hometown, and to her fans.

Liminal Space, she explained, is a term her mother taught her, referring to both physical liminal spaces, places of movement and new beginnings such as airports, and metaphorical liminal spaces, transitory periods in one’s life. With her family in the audience and many fans she knew personally, Gretta interwove acoustic renditions of her songs with stories of their writing and origins, from anecdotes of high school dating mishaps in Melbourne to travels in Paris and London, with a naturally comedic delivery. She took the audience through the liminal spaces of her life, the physical and emotional transitory periods that have underscored the last ten years.

Singing about love, heartbreak, moving on and growing up, timing, travel and her twenties, Gretta’s descriptive, sharp and quite literal lyricism was perfectly suited to a show that blended music and storytelling. As well as songs from her two studio albums Positive Spin (2023) and Begin To Look Around (2021), she performed older music, such as her award-winning single ‘Drive’. Her characteristic indie-pop sound also translated beautifully to acoustic performance, with minimal backing music bringing the lyrics and clear, strong vocals into focus. We heard all the versions of Gretta written straight onto the page, songs about being seventeen sung by a singer now twenty-seven, to a room of teenagers and young adults who can see and feel and hear snippets of their own lives in her words and songs and stories.

Gretta also balanced these universal themes with very specific mentions of places, names and things in her songwriting. From lyrics such as “Sushi on Smith Street” and “For here we are in the summer’s heat, Brunswick Street", to songs like ‘When We’re in Fitzroy’, and ‘Paris’, places are a key theme in Gretta’s writing, which made walking down Brunswick Street among groups of young Melbourne girls on the way to the concert feel particularly poetic.

Made rawer, realer, and closer to home by virtue of their acoustic rendition, every song felt like a story, a memory, a piece of Gretta’s life that we could feel and see and relate to ourselves. Gathered together under dim and dappled light, in the warmth of the ballroom with the winter night outside, the show felt vaguely like a houseparty, a family function, a gathering of friends.

The crowd sat enraptured by the whirlwind of guitar, the feeling of growing up, the beautiful vocals and female friendship and piano, memories and lights and coming of age and the city.