Speaking to New Zealand songstress Pip Brown, better known to music lovers as Ladyhawke, about her recently released, much-anticipated second album, Anxiety, one thing is clear: though it was a long time coming and its release was much delayed, its creation was both a labor of love and a transformative experience.

Ladyhawke, of course, rose to worldwide prominence back in 2008 with the release of her self-titled debut. It spawned a number of hit singles – among them ‘Paris Is Burning’ and ‘My Delirium’ – and snagged her a number of important awards, including the 2009 ARIAs for Best Breakthrough Artist in both the single and album categories.

That success, however, had its downsides. Although Brown says that she “absolutely loves” to play live, the almost three years she spent extensively touring in support of the album and gigging all over the globe took its toll, both personally and creatively. She concedes that she took “a pretty long break” from music in all forms after she finished that tour, neither listening to it nor attempting to create any more of her own.

“In all honesty, I came off the tour and sort of literally collapsed. I was so over-saturated with music in every possible way that I just felt completely weighed down by it, you know? I couldn’t even stand to listen to it on my iPod or to watch it on television. I just completely shut myself off from it for a long while and waited until I was ready for music again,” Brown says, speaking from London.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, having such a successful first album was really amazing. But it was also definitely also a weight and I did feel the weight of that. I had to sort of shut off from music. I wanted to wait until I was really desperate for it again, until I knew I needed it, until I was actually really missing it again, but there was also a flipside to that because I had all these encounters where people would ask about the second album and joke about the second album curse and I was freaking out that it was going to happen to me, that I’m either not going to be able to produce anything or what I do produce won’t live up to the stuff on the first album.”

Brown need not have worried, of course, because Anxiety is every bit as good as its predecessor. Indeed, in some ways it is better – the requisite hooks and melodies are still there, but the lyrics are far darker and more intensely personal, something that lends the album’s 11 tracks a deeply emotive and confessional quality.

“I’ve always enjoyed writing songs where the music is upbeat and that sort of lulls you into a false sense of security and you realise that the lyrics are actually really dark. I’ve always enjoyed that contrast. I sort of unintentionally started doing that and then one day I realised that, yeah, the music was all really upbeat and the lyrics were just really, really dark. They’re quite personal and very real. I got halfway through the process and wondered whether I was being too personal. I’m quite a private person and I don’t like being too personal, I don’t like the idea of everybody knowing everything about my life,” Brown concedes.

“But I thought that it’s what’s coming out of me, it’s apparently what needs to happen for me to write these songs, and everything I write, someone else has already experienced that emotion or that feeling, so hopefully people will really be able to relate to it. It’s not ever going to be in vain. It’s helped me get through a particular time in my life. It was very cathartic for me, the songwriting process, to work through that stuff and kind of just get it out of my system, really. I felt like a huge weight was off my shoulders when I finished the album. It was really awesome. I felt like a completely different person, so it was quite an intense process to go through.”

Originally slated for a March release, Anxiety’s release has been both feverishly anticipated and oft delayed. Brown says she has lived with the finished product for so long now that she’s “completely ready to put it out there for people.” She began working on the album in mid-2010 and spent eight months writing and recording.

“It’s been pushed back a few times, for various reasons, which I do understand, but it also gets a bit frustrating. They were trying to do right by me and I appreciate that. Back in March, I’d literally just arrived back in the UK after going home for Christmas and I didn’t even have half the promo done for the release that really needed to be done. I think, in the end, they just wanted more time for me to do the build-up promo and they wanted to make sure the timing was right, so hopefully it is,” Brown admits, laughing quietly.

Late last year, Brown played a handful of gigs for members of her mailing list. The shows gave her the opportunity to both debut her new songs and to gauge how her old material would mesh live with her newer works. She says, with no small amount of relief, that she was “really, really pleased” with how those shows went.

She returns to Australia for a tour in July, though Brisbane fans will miss out on the opportunity to hear her play live because she’s appearing at Splendour in the Grass. As in past years, contractual obligations prevent Brown from playing a Brisbane gig, but she promises she’ll be back “later in the year, at some point, absolutely.”

“I was nervous before those shows last year. It was all an experiment to see how it would go love and what people’s reactions would be. It was playing just for fans and, really, in lots of ways it was the perfect environment in which to test run the new songs. I also just finished a tour that was 13 shows all over the UK, playing all of the new album and about three-quarters of the first one, and I was so relieved because it went well!” Brown says.

“I’m really proud of the album. Having it out will be a huge weight off my shoulders and I’m just excited to have something out there that might not necessarily be what people expect of me. The new songs fit really nicely with the old ones when I play them live and all that sort of thing so, yeah, I’m excited to have it out there and have people listen to it.”

Anxiety is out now through Modular Recordings/Universal Music Australia.