Releasing a new song is always a scary time for Alfie Arcuri.
The winner of The Voice Australia in 2016, always writes from personal experience, baring a little more of his soul with each track.
So it's no surprise that the release of new material fills him with a mix of emotions.
"It's always exciting releasing a new song, but it's scary at the same time," the 34-year-old from Catherine Field in Sydney's south west said.
"You don't know how people are going to react.
"It's a baby that you nurture without anyone seeing, and then you present it to the world.
"You just want everyone to love it."
His latest musical baby is new track Overtime, released on Friday.
The song details Arcuri's own experiences with anxiety and the cloud of mental health.
It was written before COVID, but the singer said the pandemic has made the song even more relevant.
"Anxiety is something that I've had to deal with for most of my life," Arcuri said.
"With my history, coming out quite late, I suffered severe social anxiety as a teenager.
"I started uni and in the time it would take me to drive into the studio at uni, I'd be petrified of interacting with people and having them uncover my identity.
"It became this shadow that has followed me around my whole life, just reappearing, and it seems the pandemic has made it relevant again."
Arcuri said COVID had such a significant impact on the arts industry and he knew many other performers had faced similar battles in the past couple of years.
"It crippled our work," he said of the pandemic.
"It was already hard before COVID, but then this came in and completely crippled our industry.
"For the first time in a while I was just as scared as I was as a teenager.
"But on the flipside, working on this song have me a distraction from all that. We shot the video all through COVID and we've been nurturing it for about a year and a half now.
"It's great to have something good come out of what was a hard situation for me and many others in our industry."
Arcuri said he hoped the honesty of his personal experience in the song would connect with people who may be going through similar struggles.
He said it could be hard to talk about mental health, and if Overtime made someone feel a little more understand, then he had done his job.
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"The most important message is what the song's about, shedding light on anxiety and depression," Arcuri said.
"It's actually quite a hard thing to talk about. I'm with my parents a lot, I stay with them a couple of times a week, and they know what I'm off, they'll ask for explanations as to why I'm down, but I can never speak about it.
"This song is a way of expressing how I feel. I can become quite insular and hard to express these types of feelings, but maybe my song can help people and show them that they're not alone in these situations."
Arcuri encouraged everyone to do their best to support the local music industry and help it recover from the impacts of COVID.
"A lot of my friends have really struggled through this period as there's not that much support for the arts in COVID," he said.
"So please support live music in Sydney and support your favourite artists in general. At the end of the day, music and art are what makes us happy, and they're the first things you turn to when you're happy or sad.
"Without people's support, it's hard to keep producing content."
Overtime is available to stream and download now and will feature on Alfie Arcuri's upcoming EP.
