To discern between an actor and their performances is difficult business. A convincing, compelling actor is an illusionist, whose personality (at least to the public) becomes bound up with the attributes audiences have seen them display on screen. This intimacy is further complicated by the fact that nowadays every actor has an instagram account. No longer are these gilded figures distant and on a faraway pedestal, but right in front of us, on our phones, so close we feel as if we can reach out and touch them.

These ideas are the forefront of Emma Russack’s hilarious, charming EP Five Timothée Chalamet Instagram Captions. The waifish French-American (affectionately known as ‘timmatay’) has played kings, cannibals, sexually awakened teenagers, rock stars, and interstellar heroes with beguiling magnetism and loose-limbed panache. He is a serious actor and a bankable box-office star, with a legion of young girls in love with him. He is also seemingly dating his opposite—the extravagant celebrity mogul Kylie Jenner. His instagram, meanwhile, is vague and a little goofy, with seemingly off-the-cuff photographs mixed in with contract-mandated movie PR. He poses in mirrors and snaps blurry shots of friends; tiny crumbs of his life scattered to millions of fans, that on the surface seem personal and true, but which in reality give nothing away.

This is all rich terrain for Russack’s conceptual conceit: a 5-song EP, where each song is named and built around Chalamet’s Instagram captions. One night, Russack—a fan since his breakout as the amorous 17-year-old Elio Perlman in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name—was scrolling through his Instagram, and the idea “hit like lightning.” Russack, a new mother, wanted a prompt that would allow her to write music quickly, and where the parameters were small and starkly drawn. “It was a really fun creative exercise for me after having a kid. I don’t feel like being super-personal at the moment, I just want to have a bit of fun” she says.

The EP diverges from her last full-length album, the Australian Music Prize nominated About the Girl (2024), which explored personal obsession and revelation with a palette of spectral guitars and synths. Here, the sound is stripped back to its essential elements—guitar, vocals, drums. Produced and recorded by long-time collaborator Liam “Snowy” Halliwell (who also plays electric guitar and bass. Dylan Young performs drums and Nathalie Pavlovic provides backing vocals), the aim was immediacy and directness. Country-folk is the presiding texture, with Russack at the time thinking a lot about Chalamet’s performance as the elusive, folk-saviour turned rock behemoth Bob Dylan, in the biopic A Complete Unknown. With wry brilliance, Russack transports traditional country’s tortured yearning and rollicking vigor to our anxiety-ridden, technologically wearisome present.

This is clear from the outset on EP opener “HEY. U THERE 🧐 🧐.” The song is a little country number with head-swinging melodies and twangy guitars, that charts the agony of being up late at night, waiting for a love interest to reply to a text. “If you’re out there, give me a sign / Just a hello, and maybe it’ll be fine” Russack laments. Things are more settled, and peaceful on the EP’s second track “i’ve been playing with myself all day.” The photo that accompanied this caption was a picture of Chalamet as a figurine, his likeness rendered in plastic for a Paul Atreides Dune doll. Similarly, Russack toys around with the double entendre, on a song that relishes in the pleasure of a day spent alone, lolling about. The track is about the freedom in solitude, doing a bit of this and that, with no one to answer to. The ease of idleness is reflected in the song's breezy pace and pastoral, tranquil instrumentation. On track three, Russack switches the mood with “dinner last night 😋 …” a slinky bossa nova number about the enduring delight of a dinner shared with loved ones. “It's just a little ditty about a beautiful evening shared with someone over dinner, you know talking and catching up. It's not clear whether it's a lover or a family member. It's just about the simplicity and perfection of this kind of meeting” Russack says. Comic loneliness creeps in on “napkinface,” where the narrator tenderly admits to a friendship with a doodle on a napkin—”coffee stains and a tear or two / But you’re still here, staring through.” On rousing EP closer, “littlewoman. (Rehearsal pic couple of weeks ago), Russack returns to her subject matter, Chalamet. “I’m imagining the rehearsal that they were doing before shooting the film, how personal feelings probably bled into the performance, and the pressure of re-animating a beloved, old text” says Russack. The track lyrics are full of filmic and novelistic details (feet on tape marks, worn script pages, someone laughing at the wrong cue) with Russack’s aching, earnest vocals crystalline over the mix. It’s the perfect note to end on—like the young actors trying to breathe new life in Louisa May Alcott’s book, Russack similarly enlivens classic country arrangements with a quick-witted and beautiful EP of everyday longing and pleasure.