Natalie Imbruglia: Music, Freedom and Standing with Ukraine

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 30 September 2026

Natalie Imbruglia wants the people of Ukraine to know that they have not been forgotten.

The Australian-British singer, songwriter and actress, whose career has extended from the extraordinary international success of Torn to her newly released seventh studio album Algorithm, has agreed through her representative to participate in a Lviv Herald feature expressing solidarity with Ukraine. At a time when Ukrainians are conscious that the world’s attention can wander even while their war continues, the gesture is a welcome one.

Imbruglia’s message is one of support for Ukraine and for the ordinary people whose lives have been transformed by war. She stands with Ukrainians in their desire to live in peace, freedom and security, and recognises the importance of continuing international solidarity with a country whose people have endured extraordinary hardship.

There is also something peculiarly appropriate about a musician conveying such a message. Politics divides the world into governments, borders, institutions and competing interests. Music has always possessed an unusual capacity to cross those divisions. Songs travel where politicians cannot, and the emotions they convey need no diplomatic translation.

For Imbruglia, whose life has stretched between Australia and Britain and whose music has travelled vastly further, that international cultural community has been a defining feature of her career.

From Torn to a new beginning

It is almost impossible to discuss Natalie Imbruglia without beginning with Torn. Released in 1997, it became one of the defining pop recordings of its era and turned a young Australian actress and singer into an international star. Her debut album, Left of the Middle, sold some seven million copies, while the career that followed brought two BRIT Awards, eight ARIA Awards and three Grammy nominations.

Yet there is a danger in being remembered too well for something one did when young. A song can become so enormous that it threatens to freeze its performer in time. Nearly three decades after Torn, Imbruglia has emphatically declined to remain frozen.

Her new album, Algorithm, released on 4 September, is her first in five years. It moves conspicuously towards electronic pop, synthesised sounds and the dance floor while retaining the emotional candour that has long characterised her music. The album was independently financed, and Imbruglia co-wrote and co-produced every song. It is music made by somebody with considerably more control over her professional destiny than the young singer suddenly propelled to global fame in the 1990s.

That sense of liberation is important. Speaking about the making of Algorithm, Imbruglia has described reaching a stage of life in which she can take chances on herself and become, as she puts it, “the master of my own destiny”.

It is difficult to imagine a phrase with greater resonance in contemporary Ukraine.

Freedom and the right to choose one’s future

Ukraine’s struggle is ultimately about precisely that principle: the right of a people to determine their own future. Whatever immense geopolitical theories are erected around the war, the human proposition underneath them is remarkably straightforward. Ukrainians want to determine the political, cultural and personal lives of their own country rather than have those choices imposed upon them from outside.

Imbruglia’s support for Ukraine should be understood in that humane spirit. It is support for people confronted by war, for their freedom and for their hope of returning to ordinary life. It is also a recognition that solidarity matters even when a conflict has disappeared from the front pages on a particular morning.

For Ukrainians, international expressions of support can sometimes appear frustratingly abstract. A celebrity statement cannot intercept a missile, restore a destroyed home or reunite a family separated by war. Yet that does not make cultural solidarity meaningless.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has always possessed a cultural dimension as well as a military one. Ukraine has responded not by suspending culture but by embracing it. The theatres remain alive. Musicians continue to perform. Writers continue to publish.

Restaurants fill in the evenings. Young people dance until curfew approaches. Couples fall in love. Children learn songs. When an air-raid alarm intervenes, people descend into shelters and then, circumstances permitting, return to whatever they were doing before.

That persistence of ordinary life is one of Ukraine’s quiet acts of defiance.

Turning darkness into light

There is an intriguing parallel with the ideas behind Imbruglia’s new record.

Algorithm emerged from a personally difficult period. Imbruglia has spoken publicly about the album coinciding with profound emotional challenges. Yet she has also described making it as an exceptionally joyful experience.

“This is the beauty of music and artistic expression,” she has said. “You can take something dark and turn it into light.”

The observation was made about her own experiences rather than about Ukraine, and it should not be appropriated or distorted into something she did not intend. Nevertheless, Ukrainians may recognise something in it.

The strange psychological reality of living through war is that darkness and light are not mutually exclusive. Fear does not eliminate laughter. Grief does not prevent love. An air-raid siren in the morning does not necessarily prevent dinner with friends in the evening. The human mind possesses a remarkable capacity to insist upon happiness even in circumstances that appear determined to extinguish it.

Algorithm itself repeatedly performs this trick. Serious and sometimes painful ideas sit inside music designed to move. Its electronic textures represent a significant development in Imbruglia’s sound, while its themes concern vulnerability, recovery and freedom.

The title is itself an unmistakably contemporary one. Imbruglia began her recording career in a world before Spotify, smartphones, social media and algorithmically curated cultural life.

Today algorithms decide an extraordinary proportion of what appears before us.

War too is now experienced through algorithms. A person in London, Sydney or New York may see Ukraine extensively or barely at all according to the mysterious calculations governing a social-media feed. One consequence is that even an enormous European war can gradually disappear from an individual’s digital field of vision without the war itself becoming any less real.

That makes deliberate acts of attention important.

A message to Ukraine

The sentiment Imbruglia wishes this article to convey is therefore straightforward: support for Ukraine, sympathy for those enduring the consequences of the war and hope for a peaceful future in which Ukrainians are free to determine their own lives.

We should distinguish that authorised sentiment from verbatim quotation. Imbruglia’s schedule surrounding the release of Algorithm has made a conventional question-and-answer interview impractical, and the Lviv Herald would not manufacture quotations and attribute words to an interviewee that she has not personally spoken or written. Her representative has instead authorised us to prepare this feature conveying her pro-Ukrainian support.

That distinction is important journalistically, but it does not diminish the message.

Ukrainians have discovered over years of war that solidarity comes in many forms. Governments provide weapons and financial assistance. Humanitarian organisations provide medicine and shelter. Volunteers drive vehicles towards dangerous places. Journalists document events. Musicians and artists do something different: they remind people separated by thousands of kilometres that their emotional worlds need not be entirely separate.

Imbruglia’s support belongs to this last category.

For somebody whose most famous recording has travelled around the world for almost thirty years, perhaps that is particularly appropriate. Music creates peculiar intimacies between strangers. People remember where they were when they first heard a song. They associate records with relationships, summers, journeys, break-ups and periods of their lives that may have disappeared decades ago.

There will undoubtedly be Ukrainians for whom Torn belongs to precisely such memories: memories of a Ukraine before this war, perhaps even before Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. Now Algorithm arrives in a radically different world.

The algorithm cannot decide everything

There is an appealing irony in the title of Imbruglia’s album. Algorithms increasingly attempt to predict what we will enjoy, what we will purchase and what will hold our attention. Yet the things that matter most stubbornly resist prediction.

No algorithm can explain why one melody becomes part of somebody’s life while another disappears. It cannot satisfactorily calculate why people continue dancing during a war, why strangers care about people in countries they have never visited or why a song recorded in one hemisphere can mean something entirely different to somebody listening in another.

Nor can an algorithm determine what human beings ought to care about.

That remains our choice.

Natalie Imbruglia has made hers clear in agreeing that the Lviv Herald should convey her support for Ukraine. She wishes Ukrainians well, stands in solidarity with people enduring the war and hopes for the restoration of the peace and freedom in which ordinary cultural life can flourish without missiles, shelters or air-raid alarms.

From the Lviv Herald, we thank her for that solidarity.

And there is perhaps an appropriate way for Ukrainians to reciprocate. Listen to Algorithm. Listen to Torn again if you have not heard it for years. Put on whatever music makes you happy. Turn it up, circumstances and neighbours permitting.

Because one of the things Ukrainians are fighting for is the right to live ordinary lives again: to make art, listen to music, fall in love, complain about trivialities and dance for no reason whatsoever.

That is a freedom worth defending.