The question of how much power we actually have over the arc of our own lives sits at the heart of Sarah Ault’s EP No Man’s Land—both in terms of the content she grapples with across the EP’s six tracks as well as their origin story.

In early 2020, Ault—who’s also a successful hair stylist in the entertainment industry—received a mysterious offer to head up the hair department on a film shoot. She accepted what ended up being a job working on the Foo Fighters’ horror film Studio 666, based on a short story by frontman Dave Grohl. Over the course of production, Ault and Grohl developed a friendship. “The first day, Dave walked into the trailer and it was as if we’d been friends for years. Kindred spirits, for sure.”

But when the pandemic lockdown hit five days from the end of their filming schedule, production stopped and Ault was, like many of us, suddenly stuck at home wondering what to do with all her time. In the midst of LA’s terrible 2020 fire season, she found herself at a piano working through a new song she couldn’t quite figure out the time signature for. She sent an unfinished voice memo to Grohl asking for his input, and he replied by offering to record drums on the track, and ultimately the whole EP.

When Dave Grohl offers to play drums on your record, you say yes. So Ault culled the material she’d been accumulating over the course of the five years since the release of her last record Hold Fast Open Palm (2015), and asked longtime friend and collaborator Jason Hiller to play bass and co-produce. The three met up at Grohl’s famed Northridge recording compound 606 Studios in late 2020 to live track the first of the songs that would become No Man’s Land. 

Written from the perspective of someone who’s spent her life pulled between her many possible selves and hungers, the songs on No Man’s Land see Ault grappling with her agency. “I have desires, that’s no question / But I am tired and I am grown” sings Ault on the EP-opener and title track, pointing toward the distance between the life we might want for ourselves and the adult necessity of giving up what doesn’t serve. This split between longing and reality is one Ault knows well. Raised in Los Angeles by two music-lovers who ultimately pursued other paths, Ault grew up surrounded by music and learned piano from a young age. As she got older, her love of singing became a balm in an otherwise challenging adolescence. “I got in trouble a lot. I got kicked out of every school I ever went to,” Ault says with a laugh. By the time she got to high school, she was ready to re-commit herself to the straight-and-narrow. She joined a prestigious choir in a highly competitive school district, but eventually her family moved out of the district and she lost her place in the school, and the choir as a result. It was a huge blow to a burgeoning musician that thought she’d finally found her place. “I didn’t do music after that for a long time,” she reflects.

Ault went on to study hair immediately after graduating high school, a decision that led to a successful and sustainable career working in the entertainment industry, but one that made it challenging to commit to her first love. But she felt continually pulled toward music, unable to part with it entirely. Since then she’s released two records, toured extensively with friend and fellow singer-songwriter Mary Scholz, and worked as a backup singer to LA legend Jen Awad. But it wasn’t until Grohl offered her the opportunity of a lifetime that Ault realized she could truly re-commit to herself and her project. No excuses.

That conviction to meet herself and her fear head-on imbues the songs on No Man’s Land with something of an outlaw sensibility. These are songs that could soundtrack a jailbreak or a vengeance narrative. Organs ring ominously, vocals expand choral, lush and cinematic. But their strength is paired with a stark vulnerability as Ault reckons with her own powerlessness and a pervasive sense of disillusionment. “The band keeps on playing / like the ship isn’t sinking / No rescue coming, lord / what were we thinking,” she sings on “Slow Burn,” highlighting the pain of watching the world continue to turn as it all falls apart.

And yet, there is a clear aspiration toward acceptance here that lends No Man’s Land a pervasive sense of hope. “Something told me / There’s a life outside / The lines that we can read,” she belts confidently in the title track’s refrain. It’s this faith in inexplicable magic—the profound and undeniable serendipities that play out all around, and the sense of meaning that comes when we probe a little deeper—that brings Ault back to herself. And that connection to self is a relationship she’s committed to. “I’ve waited for / Too long to let you go,” she sings on EP-closer “For Your Love”—a love song to herself. A promise to tend to all that she’s built, and all she’s yet to build.