Author: gimmiezine

Feminist Bratwave Punks Hearts and Rockets’ new video ‘Square Eyes’: “We moved entire rooms in our house to create the sets”

| gimmiezine
Original photo: Kalindy Williams. Handmade collage art by B.

We love Naarm-based feminist bratwave punk band Hearts and Rockets. We first chatted with the inspiring duo when we started Gimmie. Today we’re premiering their super fun clip ‘Square Eyes’ which is the first single off their forthcoming EP TV is Boring, their love letter to TV—one of their favourite things. We chat about making the clip, EP, 80s horror flicks, The X-Files, TV shows, and other creative projects in the works. We wanna have a TV Party tonight! with Hearts and Rockets.

Hearts and Rockets were one of the first bands that we interviewed for Gimmie. We’re excited to have you check-in with us again; what’s life been like lately for you?

KURT ECKARDT: Life is SO weird! Life is always weird, but lockdown #6 hit us in Melbourne in a strange new way. I’m so grateful to have a creative outlet that can be completely self-contained and can be done at home, and so so grateful for our doggo Bonez. She and I have had some pretty heartfelt moments lately, thankfully she’s a very good listener.

KALINDY WILLIAMS: We are really so thrilled to be chatting with you again! Thank you so much for your support. You always feature our favourite bands and artists, we really love all that you do.

Thank you! The love is mutual. You have a new EP TV Is Boring coming out on cassette in November and it’s a collection of songs about TV; what was the initial spark that gave you the idea to write to this theme?

KW: We were writing songs for our next album, and we had so many ideas! While we were writing melodies for them, we found a couple with kind of ‘working’ lyrics that referenced TV, mostly in the chorus. From this we kind of discovered a running theme. We realised that four main songs that we were close to finishing all went really well together and had a loose theme of television, so we decided to separate them out and create a fun EP!

KE: We also both love TV and movies, and we’ve had a few songs on previous releases about both so it’s kind of a continuation of that. It was tempting just to make the whole album about TV to be honest, but that’s pushing it, plus we have other things to sing about – some of which are a little more important.

How long has the EP been in the making for?

KW: We had a show planned for July this year, which was then rescheduled ‘til October, and now is in limbo, where we were going to play a set of entirely new songs that we were working on for our album. It was set to be at The Tramway Hotel which is a lovely small and super intimate venue, and we were really looking forward to kind of trying some things out live to see how they sounded. When lockdown #5 hit and it was postponed, we decided to make sure we didn’t waste that energy and momentum and got to recording a few of the tracks.

KE: Yeah, we pulled those TV tracks out and knuckled down and finished them off, then took our time recording them at home. So, I guess we started the EP officially in August, and had it recorded by the end of that month. In concept only for the past few months, but I think one or two of these song ideas were kicking around for a while leading up to that decision.

Art by Kalindy Williams.

I know that you both have fond recollections of staying up late and watching Rage and bad movies; what are some of your favourite bad movies?

KW: We both watch lots of horror movies, mostly 80s horror as well as silly comedies. A few great ones that we have watched recently are Dudes (punks on a roadtrip), Times Square (punk girls making punk music against the status quo), Hell Night (frat party murder house), Once Bitten (silly slightly problematic 80s vampire romance/comedy/horror with Jim Carrey), Earth Girls Are Easy (80s does 50s does 80s alien movie), Aerobi-cide & Death Spa (both ridiculous 80s workout-themed horror movies), Sorority Babes in the Slime Ball Bowl-o-Rama (single location – a bowling alley – horror movie) and anything by John Waters. He’s the king of bad taste, and I think everything he does is iconic.

KE: This is so hard, because while they’re bad, they’re so so good! My faves are The Stuff (actually the best movie ever made), Chopping Mall (security robots go bezerk), Body Melt (this country’s greatest schlock), and Happy Birthday To Me (the first horror movie that I ever watched). Plus Stay Tuned, which is a favourite of ours and was an inspiration for the video clip for ‘Square Eyes’.

Is there anything of note you’ve been watching lately? What sucks you into watching it?

KW: Sexy Beasts. I assumed it was a role play of people being aliens and squirrels. And when I watched it and realised the absurdity of it being a reality show, I couldn’t stop watching it.

And I’m always rewatching Doctor Who. Space travel, time travel, queer undertones… what more could you want?! And in this last lockdown, Buffy has been on rotation.

KE: I’m obsessed with The Golden Girls. It was one of my favourites growing up and when I thought back to that throughout my life I thought it was so weird. Like, ALF – I get why I liked that – but a 7-year-old obsessively watching Golden Girls? I’ve rewatched the whole series recently and I still love it. While it’s not 100% PC, I think it was pretty ahead of its time. I can’t help but need to know how each episode is resolved, no matter how obvious it may seem.

You’re both also avid X-Files fans (us too!); what’s your favourite episode?

KW: Mine is Zero Sum! It’s in season four and starts off with a woman being swarmed by bees in a toilet cubicle. I watched it when I was way too young, but it’s the first one I think of when I think of The X-Files. I also really like the one with Jack Black set in an arcade where that guy gets the power to control electricity – it’s got some amazing visuals in it.

KE: My fave would have to be Squeeze. It’s the first monster of the week episode, and I remember watching it when it first aired and thinking it was so cool. I also love that the monster, Tooms, reappears later in the series. He’s the perfect X-Files character. A notable mention has to go to Flukeman though, my second favourite monster from The X-Files.

My friend Tom and I were so obsessed with The X-Files when it first came out, but I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Thankfully, he was, so I conveniently stayed at his house once a week at least.

Tell us about the title of the EP?

KW: TV Is Boring came from just watching too much TV in lockdown, and realising how many TV shows follow the same formula and get boring so quickly. I like TV, but sometimes you’ve just had enough.

What did you love most about the process of making TV Is Boring?

KW: I found writing the songs and practicing them the best part, because when we found out that we couldn’t play live we just set our own reachable goal and our own reachable deadline and came at it with the attitude of not rushing and not pushing ourselves. So, it was so fun to be able to try new things, speed up and slow down songs, and because we had no time limit it made it fun and took the stress out of it.

KE: Yes totally! The beauty of self-releasing music! There’s almost always a deadline, and that’s great to make sure you get what you need to get done done, but the two of us just playing fun songs for fun and for ourselves made this such an enjoyable experience. My highlight of this year was spending time on these songs – adding more and stripping back, spending time just playing around and having fun with them. We’d hoped to be able to do that in a live scenario, but we were so lucky to be able to do that throughout the recording process.

We love how Hearts and Rockets are very D.I.Y. in all aspects of what you do. What was the best part about producing your musicyourself?

KW: Being able to record in our tiny spare room is one of the biggest benefits. If you are trying to record a guitar part and it just isn’t working that day, you can just try again tomorrow. It’s a huge benefit for us, because we don’t have to book in a studio or have those time constraints.

If we had the money to do it that way, we would! But we’re broke, plus the DIY bedroom set up works well for the type of music we make.

KE: While being DIY is a necessity for us at this point, it’s also silly not to think of it as an aesthetic decision. We could borrow stuff or call-in favours or get a grant to do something more ‘pro’, but instead we shove a SM-57 microphone in front of our amps and turn it up really loud.

While we totally respect the craft of studio engineering, we’d also say that if you’re reading this and you can’t afford to pay someone to record your stuff – just do it yourself. The best thing an old band of mine did was record using headphones as microphones. We broke a pair of over-ear headphones, gaffer taped one side to the guitar amp and one to the bass amp and ran them as inputs through a mixer. It was awesome and all it cost us was a pair of shitty headphones, a borrowed mixer, and a free audio app on a laptop.

You do what you can with what you have. If you have a lot, go for it. If you don’t, don’t let that restrict your output. The music is all that matters.

Photo: Kalindy Williams.

Which track from the new EP are you most excited to perform when shows can happen again?

KW: The opener, ‘On/Off’. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always thought of this song as a cowboy song. I think it will be fun to play because it will be hard to play. I have to play this slidey rhythmic guitar part and sing at the same time. But I love failing on stage. Also, yee-haw.

KE: For me it’s ‘TV is Boring’. It’s just so long. In the past, if a song has approached three minutes long, I’ve insisted on cutting entire verses and choruses out. Some I’ve let go, but not easily. But as soon as Kalindy and I wrote the basic bones of ‘TV Is Boring’, we both knew it had to be a long song. Then she went wild with the synth at the end – it ended up being 13 minutes long! I genuinely can’t wait for people who expect two-minute bangers from us to hear this song. It might be my favourite Hearts and Rockets song ever. Kalindy is just so boss in the recording, it’s amazing.

We’re premiering the clip for the lead single ‘Square Eyes’. The video features lots of fun scenes like a TV news reader/“weather girl” combo, a 50s sitcom witch show, a vampire movie, a zombie apocalypse, a cowgirl flick, an adventure film, a workout video (which is a little nod to a previous single ‘Workout’). What’s your favourite scene? Can you tell us a little about creating it?

KW: We spent a total of I think 5 days filming different scenes for it over about 3 weeks. We moved entire rooms in our house to create the sets with just stuff we already owned. I’m a huge vintage collector – clothing, trinkets, homewares – I love all things vintage, so it was fun to plan out and put together props and clothing for the clip.

I think my favourite scene is the witchy / sitcom one. I really love camp special effects from the 50s/ 60s/70s (like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), and it was pretty fun to try and recreate some of them for ‘Square Eyes’. We also spent so long making food props for that scene and you only really see them for about 3 seconds. They were really delicious though.

KE: I liked making cucumber sandwiches and eating them. Why do they actually taste good? They absolutely shouldn’t, and kind of don’t, but I couldn’t stop eating them. We also used a vegan ‘duck’ in the spread, and we toyed with the idea of getting a real roast chook, but somehow the vegan duck from our freezer was completely fitting. It looks so gross.

I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun making anything in my life, every scene was so much fun to shoot.

There’s also clips of “Ramones” and “Siouxsie Sioux” in the clip; how did you first discover those artists and what do you appreciate about them?

KW: Ramones was the first punk band I discovered and Siouxsie Sioux was the first goth femme person in music I was ever aware of and she is an icon. She’s so effortlessly cool and she and the Banshees had such a unique sound that I was craving when I was a teenager. I think I’ve just always wanted to be her.

KE: I think Kalindy and my first common ground when meeting was Ramones. I will never tire of that first album. I had a step-brother, Dean, who I never got to meet. He lived in Toronto, but for much of my formative years he’d send me mix tapes. My favourite was called ‘Smells Like DEAN’S Spirit’. In the late 80s and early 90s he’d send me tapes with bands that I’d never heard of – I was like 7, 8 years old when he started – and it was bands like Ramones, Siouxsie, TSOL, Angry Samoans, Slayer, Pixies, The Stupids… like really cool punk stuff that I don’t think I would have heard otherwise, at least not at the time.

Blitzkrieg Bop started one of these tapes and I swear he put it there like a gateway to the rest of the tape… but it got me hooked, and I’ve loved Ramones ever since. Siouxsie and the Banshees were on that same compilation, it was ‘Love In A Void’, and I was so obsessed with it. One of the first records that I ever bought was their Peel Sessions EP and I treasure it to this day – their live to air version of ‘Love In A Void’ rules

You’ve been together for around four or so years now. What has been your proudest moment during this time?

KW: My teenage self would be so proud of us being on Rage! And every time we play a gig and people yell our lyrics back at us, that makes me so happy that we have made a connection with so many people through our music.

KE: OMG yes Rage, I still can’t believe we’ve had a few of our clips played on Rage. And yeah same. The first time we ever played our song Drama Club live, we had just written it and hadn’t learnt the lyrics yet, and Billiam from Disco Junk was there and held up our notebook for Kalindy so that she could sing it. There’s only one live moment that beats that, and it’s when we played it a few months later and BIlly was there again, in the front row, singing along.

Music-wise what bands, albums or songs have you been enjoying of late?

KW: Our label mates Zig Zag have just released their single ‘I Care About You’, and it’s so catchy, I am constantly singing it around the house, their joy and energy is infectious and they really do care about you! I love it!

KE: Wow, where to start?! I’m loving all of the Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice singles that have been coming out, they’re such a good band. Other newish releases that I can’t get enough of are K5’s album, Eat-Man’s record, Sweeping Promises’ Hunger For A Way Out and I haven’t been able to move past Blake Scott’s album from last year. Oh and Gordon Koang! Such pure and positive music, it’s impossible not to enjoy a Gordon Koang track.

You’re currently working on album number three, which is due out mid-2022; what can you tell us about it at this point?

KW: We still have a lot of work to do on it but at the moment we already have one really good song about a being a clown and at least one song about bugs – so I’m pretty excited about that.

KE: Album number three is so exciting to think about. I have genuinely liked each of our releases more than the last, and I can’t ask for more than that. Our goal is to constantly change what we’re doing, challenge ourselves, and keep making the music that we want to hear. This EP and our next album is all of that for me. Also, geez Kalindy just writes so many good songs… We could make a thousand OK albums, but we want to make a few really good ones.

What else have each of you been working on?

KW: I started a daily art project in lockdown in May 2020, it was going to be a 100-day project where I would make an art postcard everyday with whatever I already owned (lockdowns meant art supplies were scarce). But lockdowns kept going so I just kept making them. There are collages, illustrations, cut paper pieces, paintings, embroidery and anything else you can think of, they have been some of the best and some of the worst pieces of art I have made (hahaha) and I think some of them will be really good record covers or band posters. We actually used two of them for the covers of our last record and one for a poster last year. I’m currently at about 530-ish different postcards, which is wild!!!! And right now, I’m preparing for an online art show in mid-November to showcase the first 500 art postcards on my website http://www.orbitarcade.com.au.

I’m also planning to make a new photo zine in the next couple of months and work on some new music videos!

KE: I spend lots of my time preparing for a radio show that I co-host with Maddy Mac on PBS FM. We play music from so-called Australia and our closest neighbours, and I spend loads of my time in front of a computer screen listening to new music! I’m also tinkering away on some new solo music, but I don’t have any plans to share it just yet. Lots of my work revolves around live music events, too, so once lockdown lifts, I will have so many fun projects to announce!

Hearts and Rockets’ new EP TV Is Boring -is out on cassette November 26, 2021. Pre-order HERE at Psychic Hysteria. Please check out heartsandrockets.com + psychichysteria.com + Kalindy’s art.

Post-Punk Rave-Up Wild Man Cong Josie: “I have always had the belief that anyone is an artist”

| gimmiezine
Original photo by Nadeemy Betros. Handmade mixed media art by B.

At Gimmie HQ we’ve been bumping the new Cong Josie album Cong! hard since it arrived in our inbox. We loved it so much that we ordered the hot pink limited edition vinyl version. The album is officially out Oct 22 on It Records (home of our favs – New War and Atom). It’s a fabulous high energy clash of minimal synth, EBM (Electronic Body Music), rockabilly-ish vocals, punk attitude with a whole lotta throb and thrust, along with some heart tugging surprises.

Today we’re debuting the electrifying song ‘Cong The Singer’ along with its video, a guerrilla D.I.Y. ode to the Naarm/Melbourne suburbs that spawned Cong! We chatted with the man, the myth, the legend himself, Cong Josie alter-ego of musician Nic Oogjes.

In your heat beat ensemble NO ZU you play instruments; now as Cong Josie you’re just singing?

CONG JOSIE: Yeah. It was a really deliberate choice, a really arrogant choice [laughs], that’s kind of what the song ‘Cong The Singer’ is about. Arrogant in that I’ve never been a singer. I love singing; I love singing in the shower. I’ve always loved singing along to Roy Orbison, trying to sing ‘Crying’. Very ambitious targets! All of the “Bobby Movement” like Bobby Darrin; there was a lot of guys called Bobby in the 50’s that did rock n roll ballads. Elvis. All that kind of stuff. It was a deliberate decision not to carry around instruments anymore.

I keep going through these things with each new project. After my first when-I-was-becoming-an-adult-and-start-taking-things-seriously band, I was like, ‘I don’t ever want to have to carry around a drumkit anymore!’ I would be up front playing some rototoms so that I could stand up, and that led into NO ZU. I was only going to carry standup percussion, but then it expanded. It grew to a point where I didn’t want to carry all this stuff around; trumpets, all sorts of stuff. There was lots of clothes for each band member too, I’d carry around to each gig. Our baggage loads on planes were crazy!

I was like, ‘I just want to be a singer!’ Even though I can’t sing. That’s really arrogant, but I have always had the belief that anyone is an artist and anyone can make something interesting if you have the drive and ideas. In fact, most of my favourite singers, that I just mentioned… even Roy Orbison, sings off key, which makes his voice really interesting and intriguing, where he often has to bend into a note. There are a lot of notes that aren’t quite right.

I love singers that are non-singers, I find their voices really interesting. There’s this Greek singer Márkos Vamvakáris, who was one of the biggest rebetiko stars; they call it the Greek Blues, it’s a lot about hash dens and sordid activities. It was real people’s music, real working-class music. His voice is like a chainsaw! It’s not good, but I love it, it has the most edge to it. Obviously, that throughout punk and post-punk as well, it’s like that. It’s from that background that I thought I could at least make something interesting. I can sing these two notes, kind of, if I’m in this register [laughs].

[Laughter]. What else is the song about?

CJ: It’s about playing with that idea of a singer. It’s a fantasy tale about being a hero of the suburbs. I’ve never really understood why everything has to be so city-centred, and why everything has to play into these references of what’s cool and what’s happening now. In my fantasy dreamworld, there would be pockets all throughout the urban sprawl of Melbourne and beyond, where amazing music is happening. And, there’s this one singer that plays around the Eastern suburbs, around the R.S.L. and chicken-parmigiana-pubs, that are actually really creative and great but for whatever reason in our culture (in the 80’s bands would go out and play those places), it’s just not a thing now. It’s about that, because it’s just an impossibility.

The other layer is that actual baring of childhood and real-life things. As I was saying before, it’s amazing to hear yourself in music. I haven’t heard other people mention the Eastern Freeway in a song before! It’s a pretty good road [laughs]. It also expresses that driving was a form of freedom when I was younger. Going to the city, to places for “culture” and discovering different kinds of music was really important to me. So, that road means a lot.

Even my suburb. I’ve actually moved back to my teenage house, that’s where I am now. I bought it off my mum, which was very strange. I remember living here when I was younger, I remember this Australian rapper called Bias B, he talked about the trainline here. Aussie hip-hop around 2000 was the first time I ever heard specific areas mentioned. He talked about the Burra to Eltham train! Growing up here in a leafy suburb having nothing to say, but it’s not true, hearing things like that, I loved it, and that’s probably how it fed into my work.

The video clip we’re premiering for ‘Cong The Singer’ is really fun! What do you remember about filming?

CS: We only shot it two weeks ago, so I remember all of it [laughs]. And if anyone wants to know, we did do it Covid safe, I’m even wearing a mask in one part. I was actually saying this to Nick [Mahady] who filmed it with me…

He did your ‘Leather Whip’ clip too!

CJ: Yeah. This is kind of like ‘Leather Whip #2’. The first song was set in Greece because we happend to be there before Covid. Nick is a really great friend and talented artist; he did the portrait artwork for my releases so far and the Cong! cover. He’s an example of someone that is so open and creative and sensitive. We have a really great relationship, since I discovered more about myself and valued that aspect in people even more.

I was saying to Nick, that this video and ‘Leather Whip’ mean so much to me and are so close to me, because we literally went out with a camera and a few sketched ideas. We saw a rabbit, so we filmed a rabbit. We saw a bin chicken… or we decided to go to the river, which felt like minus thirty degrees! It was all very spontaneous over two days. It was nerve-racking also.

The first shot we did was Footscray Amphitheatre. We got there and it was so quiet. It was a Saturday morning, beautiful weather.  A couple of people were sitting in their Northface jackets drinking coffee. There were two groups of people looking down at exactly where we were filming. There were people jogging. Being in a cowboy hat, add to this debaucherous music, which we knew was going to be loud for a moment; I had my little Bluetooth speaker to mime to. It was scary! We actually started talking to each other, “Oh maybe we can do this other shot” [laughs]. We started setting up and one of the people there made a joke to me, he said, “Are we going to get an organ performance?” Because he saw my pants underneath my long jacket I was wearing and that broke the ice. I was like, ‘Ok, this is alright’ [breaths a sigh of relief], and then I started performing. I was like, ‘This is the best grassroots campaign ever, I just made three fans!’ It was me and Nick, and Johnny Cayn (Cayn Borthwick) was there.

The clip is very direct and real. It’s very D.I.Y. This is going to sound really bad, but I can’t stop watching it. My band The Crimes that are in it, can’t stop watching it either. There’s so many funny bits. They’re like, “Why are you presenting the Westgate Bridge?” [laughs]. I’m like, ‘I don’t know?!’

Do you have a favourite moment from the video?

CJ: In one of the first musical breakdowns, I’m on the Coburg Lake stage and there’s people having picnics, bemused by what we were doing – I’m either clicking my fingers or combing my hair – and there’s a rollerskater behind me twirling. That was a guy we met while we were packing up. Initially there were two boxers on stage. They said they were happy to be in the video and they had the music cranked, they were big beefy guys; then they told us they didn’t want to be in it. As we were packing up one of the boxers were like, “Hey, get Tony! Tony is amazing. Get him in it.” We introduced ourselves and asked if he wanted to be in it. He said, “Ok.” Then he started doing spins and we pretended music was going on. It’s one of the most beautiful shots, because he’s really great. It’s a great juxtaposition.

That’s one of my favourite shots too! His leg movements are perfect, such finesse. It works so beautifully.

CJ: There’s another one second shot of us with a beautiful white dog.

That’s my other favourite shot!

CJ: There was a mum and daughter walking their dog. I was doing the shot where I comb my hair near the car, obviously people were looking at us a bit strange. I said ‘hi’ as they walked past and thought maybe I should ask them if we can get a shot with that big gorgeous dog. They were really happy to, and they gave me treats to keep the dog in the vicinity. You don’t get shots like that otherwise. I wanna keep doing it. Maybe it’s a great way to build my fan base [laughs], very slow and labour intensive.

[Laughter]. We’re so happy to be premiering the song and video, it’s right up our alley. We really love your whole album Cong! It fuses so many things we love together – it has a kind of rockabilly vocal and then it’s got an EBM feel and a punk spirit.

CJ: Yeah, cool! It has all of those things. I really dug into a world of the Norton Records label, they do some really great outsider rockabilly like Hasil Adkins. Those wild rockabilly/rock’n’roll/country fellas: Jack Starr, Stud Cole, Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Terry Allen are some of the sleezy cats that have been an influence. Also, a lot of the artists that The Cramps were inspired by, they called them wild men, and apparently some of them really were—that’s a big influence on who Cong is. Cong is the wild rockabilly artist but in a suburban Australian setting, so he’s also gonna be a bit different.

In terms of the electronics, I was never able to focus on the throb, as I call it, the throbbing rhythm. In NO ZU everything was still mechanical and awkward funk, a bit more danceable in a different way. It’s a big clash of those things.

I love Johnny Cayn’s guitar on the track. It’s probably the most slide-y, rockabilly thing on the record. It’s just wild and out of control.

Yes! It’s very cool.

CJ: I really love Simone aka Mona Reeves’ voice with the “Saturday night” part on there too, which is inspired by the Elton John ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ track. Just that idea of being really excited by a Saturday or Friday night is a musical trope that was really fun to explore!

Ed’s note: We spoke with Cong Josie for over a hour, this is a small extract from a more in-depth chat exploring the entire album, growing up in Melbourne, toxic masculinity, Nicolaas Oogjes musical evolution, creativity, getting through life’s challenges, and creating your own world to heal and grow. Read it in our next print issue (#5) we’re currently working on.

Pre-order Cong! HERE. Follow @congjoise

Naarm Punks SHOVE: “Record and release things sooner… don’t just sit on material or ideas for years then get depressed that no-one has heard your stuff”

| gimmiezine
Photo by Dylan Jardine. Handmade collage by B.

With raw expression and attitude Naarm/Melbourne punk band SHOVE are about to drop their debut EP 7” on the world. Maq of The Faculty gave us a heads up on them last year singing their praises: “I’m gagged for that new band Shove I think they are formidable.” Indeed, they are; they’re here to obliterate us. SHOVE’s Ham, James and Bella tell us about the release.

How did you first get into punk?

HAM: I grew up in a small-ish town in regional NSW (the country music capital!), and was a snotty teenager who was pretty pissed off. Having some sort of outsider complex coupled with access to the internet meant I ended up listening to bands like Rudimentary Peni and The Locust. All the dudes I used to hang out with back then were more into metal, which I thought was too slow “where’s the speeeeed man!” (Although now in my older age I have more appreciation for it).

JAMES: I wasn’t really into punk when I was younger.  Then about a decade ago I saw this band called Battle Club. Their shows were so dirty, and intense, I just wanted to be around that all the time. And now finally I have fulfilled my destiny, as Hamish (the bass player from Battle Club) plays drums in SHOVE!

What’s one of your all-time favourite albums and what do you appreciate about it?

HAM: Ooof, hard question – there are too many to count. Although it’s not an album, I’d have to go with The Shitlickers self-titled EP. I mean, it’s 8 songs so it nearly counts as an album. The whole thing is so sonically extreme and ridiculous it’s hard not to chuckle when listening to it. The riffs are absolutely shredded and the drums are simple but absolutely brutal and full of frothy spit and energy. Rumour has it that to get a sound that fried, they resorted to stabbing their amp speaker cones with needles. On top of this churning mess, the lyrical content is full of far-left despair and the sentiment of capitalism being shiiit, which is something I think most people can get behind in 2021.

How did you discover your local music community?

HAM: When I moved to Naarm I ended up living in sharehouses with people who played in the local music scene. It kind of snow-balled from there, where the majority of my friends and everyone I hang out with either plays in bands or I regularly hang out with them at gigs. I was always pretty into music zines when I could find them too so it was a pretty natural progression from reading them to wanting to get more involved.

Bella, I know this is your first band, and that you’ve “spent too much time on the other end of the industry to know how corrupt and generally useless it is”; can you share with us a little bit about your experience with the industry?

BELLA: As far as cliches go, the one about big egos in the music industry isn’t an unfounded one. Local community stuff is great but once you move into a national stage things become more about how much money you can make off some group of young white cis males from Byron who are probably writing some catchy form of indie pop that’ll take them to the top of a meaningless annual countdown, help them sell out a few shows and the next year never be heard of again. Not to mention the high levels of patriarchal sexism, misogyny and multitude of other -isms that are prevalent the whole way throughout.

SHOVE’s been around since 2019, but members of SHOVE are from bands Shit Sex, Eat-Man and Burger Chef, collectively you’ve been involved in music for a while now; what’s something that you’ve learned doing what you do that you wish someone would have told you earlier on that would have made things a little easier for you?

HAM: Most of the learnings I would tell my younger self are still things that I’m still not good at today, and still trying to improve. Things like ‘Get better at relaxing and talking to people you don’t know so well’. Or ‘Record and release things sooner and then move on, don’t just sit on material or ideas for years then get depressed that no-one has seen/heard your stuff’.

What brought SHOVE together?

BELLA: Well, the boys were already jamming and I was working in an ice cream shop when I realised that punk rock was my true calling

You’re first show was Best Fest 3 back in 2019; what are your recollections from the show?

HAM: I was at this show as a punter. I remember seeing Shove playing and thinking “How the fuck is this Bella’s first gig!? She’s so good!”

You’re releasing your debut self-titled EP 7 inch, which you recorded with Alicia Saye. What was the recording process like for you? (I know your earlier single releases were recorded separately in your own homes). What did you love most about the process?

JAMES: I’ve had the good fortune of having Alicia as our sound engineer at a bunch of shows in a few bands over the years. You always know you’re in good hands when she’s behind the desk. So, we were stoked when Alicia said she’d record us, we knew the technical side of things was covered. What I loved the most about the process was probably getting to hang out with that legend for a couple days, she tells ripper stories. Definitely spent more time eating chips and talking shit than we did making music, which keeps everything feeling chill when you do go to record.

HAM: Yeah, Alicia is a complete gun. We recorded It over a weekend. It was really nice having someone pulling the levers who knows what ball-park you’re aiming for and who can also set you back on track when you’re off your game and losing your shit a bit.

What’s your approach to songwriting?

JAMES: We’ve gotta keep it simple. One of us usually has a sound that’s been stuck in their head for a week, the other instruments join in, and Bella tells us if it’s a number-one hit. Bella will do her self-proclaimed muppet singing along with it, but then she takes the phone recording home and does the lyric writing in bed with an ice cream.

HAM: What James said. It has always been pretty collaborative. Generally, someone will have a riff and we build from there. Everything is up for discussion and no idea too stupid to try, but also nothing is too precious for the bin if it doesn’t work. Thankfully we all tend to be on the same or at least very similar pages when songwriting so it’s fun.

The song ‘Power’ from your EP also features on the Blow Blood Record compilation A Long Time Alone 3 (you had a track ‘Non-essential Citizen’ on the ALTA 1 comp too); what sparked it’s writing?

HAM: Someone brought in a riff which sounded really good when paired with a d-beat underneath it. When Bella added some vocals, we got really excited because it brought it all together and added the necessary punch.  

We really love the song ‘Control’; how did it come together?

JAMES: I started this one off. I again forgot that I was playing a bass guitar and just starting frantically trem picking. It doesn’t help that I learned guitar from playing Guitar Hero… But the others were supportive as always, and ran with it. I think a defining feature a good band, of bands that’ve worked well for me, is that when you’re in a room and you play something that sounds a bit rough, a bit stupid, everyone just stands back and goes “hmm, maybe that could work” instead of dismissing it.

What made you decide to close the EP with song ‘Maggot’? How much thought goes into your track sequencing?

HAM: A reasonable amount of thought goes into the track sequencing but the final decision mainly comes down to gut feeling. Adrian suggested several different track sequences based off a few different paths the EP would take the listener on. The ultimate decision always seems to come down to if it does ‘the thing’ for your reptile brain.  

What do you get up to when not making music?

HAM: Mainly trying to make weird little animations, and I’ve recently been trying to learn how to make my own fucked up ‘walking simulator’ video game.

What’s making you happy right now?

JAMES: Without a doubt, it’s that we have the amazing support of our new label Rack Off! We seriously feel like the luckiest band in the world. At this level, I don’t expect to get more than a logo and few records on shelves, but Grace and Iso have done so much for us. It’d be a bloody shambles if we attempted to do a tenth of what they have done for the band. And well, we were already stoked to be playing shows and hanging out with our fave bands Blonde Revolver and Future Suck, so being label mates is a dream. Can’t wait to get out soon and play more shows together, and get this EP into some more ear holes.

HAM: Not too much at the moment haha. Lately I’ve been really enjoying having hot baths while listening to some dub or reggae and smoking a big joint. It’s the simple things. But also, what James said! RACK OFF RULE!

SHOVE’s self-titled EP 7” is out tomorrow (Oct 15) on Rack Off Records, a label that focuses on female-identifying and gender diverse releases.

Please check out: shovemc.bandcamp.com

Jalang vocalist Alda on ‘Santau 65’: A story that my mom told me when my activity was mainly focused within the anarchist AND communist community I was involved in back in West Java”

| gimmiezine
Original photo: Nicole Reed. Handmade mixed-media collage by B.

Naarm/so-called-Melbourne D-beat punk band Jalang are an important band to us here at Gimmie. We believe they’ve released one of the most exciting Australian hardcore releases of this year with album, Santau. It’s charged by a sense of revolutionary urgency. Lyrically exploring themes of politics, religion, feminism and queer rights in South East Asia and beyond. Vocalist Alda delivers authoritative vocals in Bahasa Indonesia and English, engaging with both her own and collective narratives, giving the songs real substance and authenticity—the record is deep. Bandmates Timmy (Extinct Exist, Pisschrist, Schifosi) on guitar, Tessa (Ubik, Masses) on bass and Kyle (Sheer Mag) on drums, work in unison to pummel the listener, charging straight ahead with tight compositions, maximising their art’s impact and given us danceable thrash.

Today we’re premiering Jalang’s full video for song ‘Santau 65’. Alda also gives us a insight into the song’s story, exploring genocide in Indonesia. An eye-opening read.

‘Santau 65’ was inspired by the 1965 Massacres perpetrated by the Suharto regime in Indonesia, where millions across Indonesia were persecuted and murdered for being communists, sympathisers or anyone suspected of; why was it important for you to write this song?

ALDA: It was a story that my mom told me in my early 20s, it was at the time when my activity was mainly focused within the anarchist & communist community that I was involved in back in Bandung, West Java. A big part of the communist/lefty bookstore that we always held our gathering was to counter the propaganda spread by Suharto’s regime, which is still heavily present in Indonesia’s society. At that time, “The Act of Killing”; a documentary on the subject was just released. It was a big deal for us, we were absolutely thrilled that it is finally out — a documentary made in over 8 years, following the perspective of one of the perpetrators of the 1965 Massacre where he bragged comfortably about all the killings etc he’s done, because he truly believed the film was about him being a hero. The fact that the director is Joshua Oppenheimer, who also works in Hollywood projects probably gave him that weird confidence. It’s a good documentary work on this subject, psychologically very interesting to see how these perpetrators justify the murders they have done in their own head. Outside of that, this is also a massively important documentary because it exposed the horrific crime perpetrated by Suharto regime even further. I was visiting my mom later after the release, and she tried to pick a movie from my laptop for us to watch together that night. She asked me what The Act of Killing was, and I said it’s a cool documentary exposing The Communist Purge by Suharto’s regime. When she realized that the film was not on the military regime’s side, she suddenly showed this horrified look that I’ve never seen before. She said I shouldn’t be touching this subject at all because I absolutely don’t know what I was talking about, the communist is evil etc (this is the belief of most Indonesian still). I asked why she thinks so, I’m trying to understand her perspective. She started shaking and crying, telling me that The Communist killed her friends and neighbours. I asked carefully, what do you mean, how… She said one day when she was 6 years old, on a late afternoon in the village that she grew up in East Java… she saw a bunch of women dancing joyfully, like they were celebrating something. Keen to join the festive mood, her and her brother dancing along. Come night-time, the whole neighbourhood was filled with noise and muffled sounds. Her parents didn’t allow her to leave her room, telling them to stay quiet and go to sleep. The next morning, she walked with her friends to a river near their house. and saw a big pile of dead bodies clogging the river. The river water was red with blood. They got close and saw a lot of their neighbours and friends on the pile. She told me this in such a tearful terror that I dare not interrupt her story at all. Her friend accidentally falls and poke his eye on one of the corpse’s stiff fingers. He’s permanently blinded ever since. She told me, The Communist kill my people, The Communist blinded my best friend, The Communist are evil. I asked, did they do the killing, mom? She said, no, it was the military, but if The Communist is not in the village, the military would have never done that!! The neighbours wouldn’t point fingers at each other in the panic that happened! She said she felt horribly guilty as if she was also responsible for it — because she danced with those women the day before. She was convinced that they must be part of Gerwani (left wing feminists); celebrating the killing of the military generals (these killings by military generals was the main justification for this purge, despite later discovered that it was also done by Suharto’s cronies). Obviously, that logic is very strange. My mom, despite being heavily religious person, is usually a very logical person. This was very out of character for her. But I thought it was obviously her PTSD. I decided not to debate her and just hugged her instead, as obviously this is a very sensitive subject. This is just one amongst millions of repressed witness story, and it shows how strong the brainwashing done by Suharto’s military regime in the 32 years of their ruling. The impact of this propaganda and the massacre is still heavily influencing Indonesian people’s psyche till this day. I believe it’s important to keep on exposing these stories to combat the unjustified right-wing propaganda, despite this moment happened 56 years ago.

Was it hard to write the lyrics given the heavy nature of, and personal connection, to the song’s themes?

ALDA: I am not a naturally gifted musician/lyricist, ha-ha. So, I had my challenges, and it took me quite a while. But I was lucky to have such patient and supportive bandmates and close friends, so eventually I managed to find a way to express this story via the song. Other than the intention to add to the witness stories battling Suharto’s military regime’s propaganda. I’m trying to express the pain that this moment has inflicted on my generation and the generations before us. The intergenerational trauma that this power play of military dictatorship comes to rise, and the realization that this event is backed by rich countries such as America because it fits their Cold War & economical interest… at the cost of over 3 million victims, and the rest of permanently traumatized Indonesian people. The realization that our country is not the only one that they have done such horrific works on.

Musically, how did the song come together? What does ‘Santau’ mean?

ALDA: Santau means deadly poison/curse. ‘Santau 65’ was about the poison of the 1965 Massacre, that has seeped into our soil and our psyche. I pictured in my mind, just like how the blood red river runs in my mother’s memory… soaked into our land and our people and poisoned us ever since.

We’re premiering the clip for ‘Santau 65’ today. Footage for it was shot by your friend Jovian Fraaije in Java; can you give us a little insight into the making of the clip and working with Jovian? Did you develop the video’s concept together?

ALDA: We told Jovi the story and context, and he comes up with the first idea — then we developed it together from then on. The live footage was from our shows in the small break of lockdowns; one at The Curtin with incredible help from Flash Forward team, and the other one is from our first show of our tour at Pony Club Gym, a queer gym in Preston close to our heart. The tour got cancelled because of Melbourne’s lockdown, but we were lucky that we managed to get any live footage at all. It was difficult for Jovi to arrange the shooting of the video — given that Indonesia was at the height of the pandemic, and Jakarta was on and off closed by lockdown. The location that we originally planned was a river near a forest, but the whole area was then closed because of the lockdown. This location managed to replace it, as there were not many choices. and even then, apparently it was guarded by local paramilitary that mugged them as well. We are glad that Jovi’s team was not harmed and with the help that we got from Flash Forward to make this video — we were able to cover the money that those paramilitaries asked from Jovi’s team so that they got “permission” to be able to do the shooting. This kind of situation is common in Indonesia btw, so there was not much surprise about it… especially considering the general poverty in this pandemic time.

The colour red appears throughout this release’s art, used on the album cover and in the film clip; was it a conscious choice? What does it signify to you?

ALDA: It was my visualization of how much blood of over 3 million Indonesian people shed in September 1965. This was personally why the cover artwork was important for me, as that is the image haunting my mind about this tragedy. Well, as much as my limited painting skill allows me to express, that is. It’s an ocean of blood, filled with poison and pain… The memories are dark, in a way that throws people into heart wrenching downward spiral in their traumatic recollection. Which was the often, transformed into hate. Strong and violent hate, which is unfortunately aimed towards the victim’s families and relatives… As a lot of them are still discriminated by the Anti-Communist masses, even till today.

How did you feel watching the clip back for the first time?

ALDA: If only both Jakarta and Melbourne weren’t in a lockdown in the middle of a pandemic, I think we can do better. But considering the situation that we are in; I think this video express enough of things that we would like to share. The footage by the end of the video is actual footage from 1965 Massacre. Hopefully that can help to visualize the situation that our people were in. The night raids by the military, banging on people’s doors… rounding them up to be killed. Houses were raided and burned down, chaos ensued, fear permeates the air intensely. The dancer is meant to represent the women dancing in my mother’s memory. Which made me think how unfair Gerwani has been portrayed and treated. But I guess that’s another story…

Can you please tell us about another song on your new record that you’d like to share with us?

ALDA: ‘Cops N Klan’ was mainly triggered by police violence all over the world, which saturated our news intensely in 2020. In general, the album’s lyrics are inspired by various crazy things and phenomenon’s that happens since 2020. Obviously, police brutality has been going on since the very beginning of their formation. We live in such a strange time. Camera phone allows citizen journalism to report their surroundings towards their viewers. We saw this brutal violence done by the police towards the people everywhere via our phones. From the consistent police brutality and Indigenous deaths in custody in so-called Australia to the biggest national riot that Indonesia have ever seen since ’98 (the overthrowing of Suharto’s dictatorship) — we see tanks rolled out on unarmed protesters. Police beating up people brutally, regardless of how vulnerable they are and how harmless the things they were doing. Shots fired at peaceful protesters. The intense racism of the police and their obvious alliance with white supremacist in countries run by white colonizers. The sample that we used in “Lawan dan Hancurkan” and the intro of ‘Cops N Klan’ are audio archives done by our brave friend Rama Putra Tantra — who relentlessly collect sonic archives of the protests that he attended in 2020, while dodging the bullets fired by the cops, avoiding the fire from burning cars, and running away from the weaponized paramilitary. The sound of the people rejecting the rising Oligarchy in Indonesia, and the passing of Omnibus Law; and their chants saying “Polisi Anjing” (literal translation; police are dogs — our equivalent of saying “Fuck the Police”). We were very lucky to be able to use this audio sample, and hopefully it can help the listeners to visualize the moments and the atmosphere of the situation.

For more Jalang check out our 7-page in-depth feature interview with Alda and Tessa exploring their new album Santau in our latest print issue: GET IT HERE.

We also interviewed them in their previous incarnation as Lái – Alda: “It is very important for women living and growing in misogynistic cultures to take these shitty narratives back, to reclaim their own stories and destroy toxic ones” READ more HERE.

Please check out: jalang.bandcamp.com.au and @jalang_dbeat

Alien Nosejob’s Jake Robertson on new record, Paint It Clear: “Hopefully it will mean something to somebody.”

| gimmiezine
Original pic by Carolyn Hawkins. Handmade mixed-media collage by B.

One of our favourite creators, Jake Robertson (you might know him from Ausmuteants, Hierophants, School Damage, Swab, Drug Sweat, SMARTS and more) is back with a new album for his solo alter-ego project Alien Nosejob. Paint It Clear is ANJ’s fourth full-length. 11 brilliant tracks mixing post-punk with 80’s new wave and even a little disco. Recorded by Mikey Young, the record has ANJ sounding more dynamic and brighter than ever. Gimmie loves Jake’s quirky, humorous and wry observational lyrics and skilful songcraft. We’re excited to share with you, the first track released from the ANJ camp in thirteen months ‘Leather Gunn’ along with our chat with Jake, a sneak peek insight into the forthcoming album.

JAKE ROBERTSON: I’ve been working a lot, it’s taken a toll, I’m basically always tired. I still have a job, which half of my friends don’t since Covid, so I’m pretty lucky in that respect. It’s hard to come home and be motivated to do anything.

When we spoke the other day, you mentioned that you’ve been having a little bit of a break creatively, and that you’ve spent most of your spare time just chilling watching TV and reading.

JR: Yeah. I’ve been reading a bunch, and watching heaps of TV. Kerry my housemate, when he moved in, he brought a giant TV with him; we’ve been going to town on it. It’s the first time that I’ve had a television in ten years—I’m lovin’ it! [laughs]. It’s so good. I’m still writing heaps; I’m constantly writing in-between watching The Righteous Gemstones or whatever.

I feel like maybe a year ago, when I was working a little bit less, I’d finish work, come home and do music for a bit, then go see some mates. Since lockdown has happened, I can’t really see friends, and sometimes can’t be bothered doing music. It’s weird, like I’ve kind of got extra time, but I don’t [laughs].

I feel like you’ve been pretty prolific and released a lot over the last few years though.

JR: Yeah, I have. But everything I’ve released, even the album you’re interviewing me about, most of that was written a while ago. I probably would have recorded it around the time the last Gimmie interview happened.

Yeah, it was around November 2020.

JR: Yeah, that was when I recorded it, but some of the songs were written around 2015, at least the embryonic versions. I’ve just touched them up a little bit.

Having a bunch of songs you’ve written over a long period of time, how did you decide which ones to use for this record Paint It Clear?

JR: The majority of the stuff that I do under the Alien Nosejob name was written with other bands in mind. One or two of them were potentially going to be an Ausmuteants song back in the day. One of them was going to be a Leather Towel song. I have a little log of all my half-finished demos that is written up and pasted on my wall. Every now and then I’ll listen back to something and go, yeah, I could do something with this.

It’s interesting that you said a few of the songs were written with other projects in mind, I had wonder that, because I got that feeling from listening to the album. Jhonny and I were talking about how it doesn’t have one particular sound like other Nosejob releases. I commented that tracks sounded like a Ausmuteants track or even Hierophants or even reminded me of the Nosejob Italo-disco album. The album feels a little like an amalgamation of all the stuff you’ve done.

JR: Yeah, kind of. When I was putting it together, I was trying to be conscious of not making it sound like it’s being too influenced by something else, even though there’s definitely a couple of songs where I’m like, ‘Oh, I was listening to a lot of The Cure’ [laughs]. I haven’t listened to it since I got the test pressing in February. It’s like The Cure with a crappy singer, not Robbie Smith [laughs]. Those two songs are ‘Clear As Paint’ and ‘Duplicating Satan’, which is the Italo-disco-sounding one you were talking about; I remember trying to make it sound like ‘The Walk’ by The Cure, one of their singles from 1983-ish. Hopefully it doesn’t actually sound like it, but I was definitely going for it.

I can totally hear the in there. What can you tell us about the album’s title Paint It Clear?

JR: [Laughs] I literally just jumbled the words of the song ‘Clear As Paint’ around. That song and the title, it was an amateur attempt of a contranym, like painting something clear. If you painted something clear it could be see-through, like glass.

Nice. You mentioned you’ve been watching a lot of TV and films. I love movies, I have since I was a kid. I’d go to the video shop with my mum and we’d get out twenty VHS is $20 for the week. What have you been watching?

JR: We had a very similar upbringing, Bianca. We’d get seven weeklies for $7; you’d pick them up on a Thursday, spend the week watching them and then pick up another seven when you brought those back the following week. I did that from when I was about eight until I was eighteen. It would be a weird week if I didn’t get out at least three videos.

Rad! Whenever I look at those 1001 movies you have to see before you die or 100 best movies of the 80’s and 90’s lists, I’ve seen most of them except for a small handful of titles.

JR: In that 1001 movie list there’s probably another 800 I’d need to see! [laughs]. I’d watch and lot but also rewatch a lot.

Pic by Carolyn Hawkins.

What are some of your favourite movies?

JR: One of my favourite movies lately, because I’ve just rewatched it is, Blue Murder, the mini-series. I created a Letterboxd account the other day, so I was actually thinking about this. I really like the movie The Vanishing, it’s a Dutch one. It’s good if you’re a fan of eerie-ish horror movies. It’s so good. Not the remake with Kiefer Sutherland, but the original. I watched Blood Simple with my housemate, it was awesome, I’ve never seen it before. Movies! Woo! [laughs]. I love Mean Girls and stuff like that as well.

We were talking about comic books before too; I was a really big fan of Ghost World growing up and still am now.

I love ­Ghost World too, and the Mean Girls movie is a classic!

JR: You have to mix up the arty ones with the blockbusters.

For sure. I can’t watch too much of anything at once, mixing things up is essential. For example, if I’ve watched a run of horror movies or true crime, I have to watch something nice and fun and not dark and brutal.

JR: Yeah, it’s time for a Pixar movie! [laughs]. Pixar know how to rip your heart out more than anything else. I feel like the only time that I shed a tear is when I’m watching a Pixar movie [laughs]. The last time I got on a plane, which seems like a long time ago now, I thought it would be a good time to watch the Pixar movie Up. I feel very sorry for the person that was sitting next to me because I was crying, slobbering all over them [laughs].

Awww [laughter]. So, the first single for your album will be ‘Leather Gunn’…

JR: Yeah, it is. When Billy [Anti Fade], Sam [Feel It Records] and I were thinking of what the first single off the album should be, we were like, we’ll each say our top three. That wasn’t in mine, but they both had it in theirs, they have the outsider perspective. To me, all of the songs, I just shit them out and I’m done with it [laughs], I don’t think about them anymore. They both had that song first, so I was like, ok, let’s do that one first.

What was happening when you wrote it?

JR: John Douglas who plays in Leather Towel with me, he was moving back to Australia from New Zealand and we were talking about doing a new Leather Towel album. I was trying to come up with something that sounded different to the first album; that was the only song that I wrote for it. We played two or three gigs, then Covid happened and he went back to New Zealand. We didn’t even get to try that song as a band. It seemed at the point where it probably wouldn’t happened, so I made it a Nosejob song. I kept the ‘Leather’ in there as a nod to that, and the ‘Gunn’ was because the original demo of it, the guitar was single note surfy, like a Peter Gunn da na da na da na na na. Lyrically, it’s about people not doing what they’re told no matter how minuscule and pointless or petty the thing they’re not doing is.

What are the songs the you really love on the album?

JR: I really like ‘Duplicating Satan’.

Was that one of the songs on you top three list?

JR: My list was ‘Duplicating Satan’ and ‘King’s Gambit’ (which will be the second one released, I wrote it in 2015 but never put lyrics to it) that was probably my best written song on the album, it took me ages to write it. The other song is the last one ‘Bite My Tongue’. I get why that wouldn’t be a not-released-before-the-album-comes-out one. That’s another one that took me ages to write. It took me ages to learn how to play it too. ‘Bite My Tongue’ and a few songs that I have, are about… you know when you have a thought or a way of feeling about a certain situation but you can’t find the words to get it out. It’s almost like a block and you just can’t say your mind. It’s a feeling I have sometimes, I can’t even tell myself what it is. Basically, it’s about a mental block and not being able to get your words out properly.

I get that, it makes sense.

JR: Kind of, I think I was trying to make sense of it in the song. Hopefully it will mean something to somebody.

I really love the song ‘Jetlagging’ on the album.

JR: That one was originally written with Ausmuteants in mind, I wrote the lyrics on an Ausmuteants tour, travelling 400kms a day and just eating the same meal over and over again. It’s a very my-first-tour, Tours’R’Us or Tours For Dummies lyrics! [laughs]. I really love that song too.

Also, I love ‘The Butcher’ which is before ‘Jetlagging’ in the album sequencing.

JR: A couple of years ago, I was getting obsessed with Terry Hall and Fun Boy Three. I was trying to write something a little bit from that camp, and The Zombies’ song called ‘The Butcher’ as well; it was definitely an influence on it, but I didn’t mean to call it the same song [laughs]… I’m kind of noticing that now.

I got Mikey [Young] to record the drums; he recorded the drums, bass and guitar for the album. Except for ‘Duplicating Satan’ which I recorded at home, and ‘The Butcher’. I couldn’t work out what I had played in the demo, I had to drag the demo out and stretch it over the drums that I played. I don’t think anyone else will notice this, but if you listen closely the drums and the rest of the music keeps on going out of time because of that. I tried to relearn how to play it, but after a while I was like, I can’t be bothered! [laughs].

Is it weird sometimes listening back to your songs and being able to remember what was happening in your life or what you were doing at the time of writing or recording it? Kind of like having a sonic diary.

JR: Yeah, it is. I might think something is not about something, but it will be. I’ll generally listen to an album that I’ve done when I get it on record, and that’s it. I actually listened to an Ausmuteants album, Amusements, the other day, it was the first time since we recorded it. It was a nice feeling; I definitely like it more than I thought I would. It was good to have an eight-year distance of not hearing it, it was recorded in 2012 or 2013. I won’t rush to listen to it again [laughs], but I didn’t hate it as much as I thought I did.

Album art by Nicky Minus.

Who did the album art for Paint It Clear?

JR: How good is it?!

Really, really good! That’s why I was asking, it’s very cool.

JR: It was done by Nicky Minus. They grew up in Hornsby in New South Wales, but they’re living in Melbourne now, and does a lot of work for the Worker’s Art Collective doing a lot of work for Union. I got onto them by following Sam Wallman who is a comic book artist/cartoonist.

Is that the same Sam who has done artwork for you before?

JR: Yeah, he did the first Ausmuteants 7 inch in 2010. I’ve been following his stuff before then, he’s besties with Nicky, I saw their stuff through that and was blown away by it. I just bought some of their art for my wall, and because I look at it every day, I was like, it could suit this album. They were into it, they wanted to make something from scratch. I’m glad they did and am super happy with the way it turned out.

What else have you been up to of late?

JR: I’ve been doing some home-recording with Vio [Violetta DelConte Race] from Primo! I’ve loved her songwriting for ages, she has a good idea of space, if it doesn’t need to be played, she won’t; the way I play is the opposite of that [laughs]. It’s kind of inspired by Michael Rother, and sounds basically like School Damage and Primo! If I could sound half as good as Primo! I’d be happy. It’s called Modal Melodies. The only rule of the project is that we’re not allowed to play live, it’s just a recording thing.

Cool! I can’t wait to hear that. I love Primo! too. They’re all such incredible songwriters.

JR: There’s a new Swab album around the corner too coming out on the label Hardcore Victim in around January or February. And, I’m playing drums on the new Ill Globo album!

Alien Nosejob’s Paint It Clear is out November 12. Pre-order now: Anti Fade (AUS) and Feel It Records (USA).

Anti Fade are also offering a bundle deal, including Paint It Clear on vinyl, the last record Once Again The Present Becomes The Past on cassette and a t-shirt and a ANJ shirt! Get it HERE.

Read another Gimmie interview with Jake: Alien Nosejob: “I wanted to make it sound like a mixtape that you’d give to your friends”

Please check out: aliennosejob.bandcamp.com

gimmie zine issue 4

| gimmiezine

It’s here! Our biggest Gimmie yet! Issue 4. Two covers to choose from!

We chat in-depth with Tessa & Alda from D-beat band Jalang! They’ve released Australia’s best hardcore record this year. We explore the album themes: politics, religion, feminism and queer rights in South East Asia and beyond. A really important chat.

Gareth Liddiard from Tropical Fuck Storm speaks about new album ‘Deep States’, songwriting, creativity, fanboying and collecting weird shit.

R.M.F.C.’s Buz Clatworthy talks, a new album in the works, lockdown being a creativity dampener, finding inspiration in films and friends.

We yarn with Emma Donovan and The Putbacks. New record ‘Under These Streets’ draws on soul, R&B, funk and the protest music of Indigenous Australia—a dynamic portrait of Blak pain and joy in all its complexities.

Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor and Bryce Wilson check-in to tell us about their new album’s journey, experiencing depression, keeping busy and the power of music.

French duo Heimat play off-kilter experimental-pop with folklore influence, cinematic-like soundscapes, and vocals in multiple languages. A chat on experimentation.

Old Home vocalist Dylan Sparks gives us a peek into their visceral performance poetry coupled with spontaneous musical composition.

We speak with Louisiana band Spllit just days after a hurricane hit their area. We adore their lo-fi weirdness. Next level music.

70’s acid-folk legend Howard Eynon has had a storied life: appearing in films including Mad Max, supporting Hunter S Thompson’s tour; performing in theatre. Recently, he’s been working on music with Zak Olsen. A brilliant chat.

Julian Teakle of The Native Cats and Rough Skies Records selects some of his favourite tracks for us.

52 pages. A4 size. Limited Edition. 

Get it: gimmiezine.bandcamp.com

U.S.A. pressing coming via totalpunkrecords.com

DR SURE’S UNUSUAL PRACTICE’s dougal shaw: “Being human is a lot to fucking handle”

| gimmiezine
Original Photo: Cielo Croci. Handmade mixed-media by B.

Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice are Gimmie favs (they were one of the first bands we chatted with when we started Gimmie). We’re thrilled to announce the new wave art-punks’ forthcoming full-length album Remember The Future?, which will be out on Marthouse and Erste Theke Tonträger, as well as premiering the entertaining video for song ‘Infinite Growth’. We love their blend of clever social commentary and politics with catchy well-written compositions and fun visuals. Gimmie spoke with guitarist-vocalist Dougal Shaw to find out more.

How have you been feeling? I know a lot has happened this past week in Naarm/so-called Melbourne with lockdowns still in place, protests and an earthquake!

DOUGAL SHAW: I’m actually surprisingly pretty good at the moment. The pendulum has swung back around to the positive end [laughs]. It’s been swinging back and forth pretty consistently. Today I’m feeling good. Yesterday I had one of those days where I was just, what’s the point? Why? [laughs]. Trying to find some motivation to keep pushing forward. In general, in the last month, I’ve been feeling pretty positive.

Good to hear. On the “why?” days like yesterday, do you just allow yourself that space and know that what you’re feeling will pass?

DS: Yeah. The last couple of years if it’s taught me anything, it’s taught me to listen to your body and mind if you’re having those down times. Maybe in the past I would have tried to push through those times and keep working on projects. I’ve realised now that, if I do try to work through those times it’s pretty shit work; you go back to it and it’s got this weight to it, you’re putting all this stuff onto it. I’ve learnt to give myself days off, which I’ve never really been good at giving myself days off—what’s the next project?

Same! Jhonny and I are like that too. This next print issue of Gimmie has taken longer to get together because we both deal with (as many people do) bouts of depression, anxiety, stress, heath problems and things of that nature. Even though it’s something you absolutely love doing and it’s fun, some days you still find it hard.

DS: Exactly. I feel like it can work both ways. In the past I have used my creative practice as a way of processing a lot of what’s going on in my world and the world around me. Potentially in those down times would be when I was more inclined to get in the studio and write music. Now maybe being removed from all of the good times, and being able to have that separation where you’re out in the world doing things and having a good time, obviously you’re not going to be doing creative things and writing in those moments, so when you have that quiet moment to yourself and you’re feeling introspective, those might be the times that I’ll go and create. Now being removed from the outside world and being stuck in my own little world, it’s made me a bit more conscious of those kinds of things. A bit more conscious of your emotional state and more intuitive when it comes to what I need for myself in each moment. Sometimes it will be that I’m not doing anything today, I’m just going for a really long walk and I’m going to try and clear these cobwebs out. The one positive, I guess, is that I have a lot more tools now to manage those things, in the past I may have found those bouts of anxiety and depression to be really overwhelming and not know how to deal with them; going out and partying used to mask those things. Without those vices to lean on, you’re faced with yourself and your like, ‘Fuck this is a lot!’ Being human is a lot to fucking handle [laughs].

Photo by Alivia Lester

There’s been a period where you haven’t been writing too many songs, especially not as many political songs, but writing more fun songs when you do write.

DS: Yeah. For a long time, I thought of my music as a vessel for change, to use my voice and privilege to start conversations. At the same time, I’ve always just written silly songs as well. I pretty much didn’t write anything for a year. I was working on other projects. I didn’t feel like I had anything to say.

I feel like you did say a lot before that, you had this run where you put out a lot, and everything was such a high quality.

DS: Thank you. Maybe that was part of it, feeling a bit empty. Being isolated from the community and from actually being able to engage with the world, I found it really hard to think about what I had to say, or I found what I had to say wasn’t worth documenting. Deciding to put this album out this year… it was floating around for a while, we finished it a couple of months ago and we didn’t feel like there was any rush, because we aren’t able to play shows for it.

By this album do you mean, Remember the Future Vol. 1 & 2 together?

DS: Yeah, that’s this one. It was a really drawn-out thing because of Covid that really felt like it was hanging over my head for ages. That was this big black cloud in my head as well. We recorded half of it at the start of last year and we were booked in to do another session in April, two weeks after we first went into lockdown. The whole idea with the record was that it was going to be the first full band recording, so I was kind of stuck on that for ages. Rather than moving on, finishing and getting it out, it was like, no, we gotta do this with the band. We finally finished it in May this year. It’s finally come together! It feels like a really weird one, because of the Covid stuff we decided to put out the first half last year. Our European label Erste Theke Tonträger, hit me up to do a record, he really liked Remember the Future Vol. 1, he wanted to do a full-length with that and then another of our EPs on the other side. I was like, well, this is half of a full record. That was the push to finish this record.

You recently had a song ‘Live Laugh Love’ on the Blow Blood Records compilation, A Long Time Alone.

DS: That was the first song I’ve written after this huge gap of not writing. The compilation was the kick I needed. I’d seen that Christina had been advertising for contributions for ages, and I thought, ‘I have to do a song for this.’ The deadline had come and I hadn’t done it, which was a Friday, so the next day, Saturday, I plugged everything in for the first time in ages and made this really dumb song.

Did it feel weird plugging everything in again after so long?

DS: Kind of. The song is funny in itself, I’m glad it has a home on the ALTA compilation, because otherwise it would have been another one on a dusty hard drive. It feels like a song after not having written a song in ages, it’s a silly song.

It has a fun title!

DS: [Laughs] I know! The concept came before the song. It’s about forgetting about how to live, laugh, love. I saw one of those inspirational infographic things that someone had posted. I’m glad it’s getting a home. I wrote that song, then in the week following it, I wrote one or two songs in a day, ten songs in a week. A week later I sent Christina a different song, and was like, ‘I actually made some decent songs now. Do you want to put one of these on?’ She was like, “It’s too late, I’ve already sent it off.”

A couple of days ago you released the song ‘Ghost Ship’ too.

DS: Yeah, that was another compilation [on Critter Records]. I wrote that one at the very start of the lockdown. It was inspired by… they were coming out with all these bail out packages, but they were going to big corporations and multi-million dollar companies [laughs]. It was a funny concept.

It’s crazy how all of these big companies received bail outs and then ended up making a profit and doing better than ever!

DS: Exactly! They didn’t actually lose any revenue; they gained all this government funding that was designed to help struggling people. That’s capitalism!

We’re premiering Dr Sure’s new clip for the song ‘Infinite Growth’. It’s a fun clip. What sparked the idea?

DS: A lot of the time when I’m doing visual stuff, I want it to be fun and playful, because a lot of the time I find the lyrical content to be pretty heavy. I liked to offset it with something a little more accessible. Potentially if you were to follow the narrative of the song then the clip would be pretty heavy—talking about mining, the destruction of the ecosystems. By taking a representation of these things, of people in suits, business men, which is a reoccurring motif in a lot of our visual stuff, and thinking about the result of their actions. For this one, they’re still pedalling their narrative of infinite growth, while the climate has heated up so much that their faces as literally dripping from their body.

Love the special effects!

DS: Yeah, really top of the line. We got the hair and makeup team… professional prosthetics! Nah. I looked up how to make prosthetics and the easiest solution that I came across was to just mix Vaseline and flour, then use coco to create different tones of it. It was pretty gross stuff to put all over your face, but it was worth it.

Pic by Cielo Croci

You wrote the song around the time that our government were talking about destroying sacred Indigenous sites.

DS: Yes, exactly. It was Djab wurrung Country. They decided to build a new highway that was going to take off two-minutes of drive time for people commuting into the city. To do so, they had to destroy these hundred-year-old sacred birthing trees. That was the spark, but at the same time, it felt like a real time of solidarity for people coming together to stand against those things. That’s where the duality in that song is trying to reframe this capitalist terminology talking about infinite growth and kind of reclaim it for the people and the ecology.

Nice. What else have you been up to?

DS: I’ve been collaborating with my partner Liv on some things, which is really nice. She’s an artist and really good photographer. We’ve worked on stuff before, a lot of the time our practices have been off in different directions. Having a lot of time together and being isolated from anyone else, we’ve been working on stuff. I spent this week making a zine to go out with the record. It’s a collaboration with Liv, she took all the photographs. It’s a zine of lyrics, photos, my art and poetry, all mashed up. She took a series of photos based around the concepts of the record and I mashed them up with my brain spew! [laughs]. We’ve been thinking about creative ways to put out this record.

Liv and I have been making some songs too. She’s been learning the guitar for the last couple of years. We’ve been putting down some of her ideas. With Liv’s limited knowledge of playing, it’s been good for me to teach her that a song can be really simple; it’s made me reassess my approach to songs. When you make a song that’s only two chords, you can leave all of this space for layering and making it interesting in other ways. It doesn’t have to have all of these chord changes for it to be engaging.

When Jhonny and I make music, I like to go for how does this feel, and keep trying things until eventually something fits and feels good to me and us. That’s when you come up with something that is unique to you, because you come with all of your experience or lack of, and that all comes out in those moments.

DS: Exactly. I feel like I’ve always approached music in a really similar way. I’ve purposely avoided learning too much. Sometimes I question if that has been the right approach? Most of the time, I stick by that approach, it’s more about feeling and how you react to it. To me, it’s always been about how you react to whatever it is you’re recording. Picking up the next instrument is a reaction to the last instrument. It’s about what feels interesting.

Pre-order Remember The Future? HERE.

RABBIT’s Bobby K: “I’m always a lovesick fool for a pop song…”

| gimmiezine
Original photo by Scott Bradshaw. Handmade mixed-media by B.

Forming just over a year ago, nipaluna/Hobart-based band RABBIT are releasing their debut 7 inch on Rough Skies Records (home of bands we love: Slag Queens, All The Weather, 208L Containers and The Native Cats) today. The quartet give us three high energy, power-pop gems. Overdriven guitars, catchy riffs, solid driving rhythms, and melodic vocals singing songs of love and heartbreak. Songwriter and guitarist, Bobby K, tells us about the band’s formation, recording the EP, and their inspirations.

RABBIT is inspired by forgotten power-pop groups and new wave punks; who are some of these inspirations and what is it that you appreciate about them?

BOBBY K: There’s a demo by Peter Case’s band The Nerves that I come back to a lot. I stumbled on a lot of these old power-pop songs because they were made popular by other artists. The first Cyndi Lauper record has a couple; Robert Hazard wrote Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, The Brains wrote Money Changes Everything. The Nerves wrote Hanging on the Telephone which I only knew as a Blondie song until I started sniffing around its roots like a truffle pig. There’s so many truffles underfoot hey, The Flamin’ Groovies, The Records, Vibrators, The Soft Boys, The Only Ones, Television Personalities, Buzzcocks, The Motels… plus all the Oz punk stuff like Celibate Rifles and Birdman and Saints. What ties the truffles together for me is sharp, simple songwriting – I’m always a lovesick fool for a pop song but rough it up a bit with overdriven guitars and demo-quality recording and you get me all buttery. Recently I got hooked on the Buffalo Springfield song Burned – prime example of perfect guitar pop, and coincidentally almost the same title as a RABBIT tune from the 7”.

You wrote and recorded the demos for the three songs on the Gone 7” yourself on a Tascam 4-track tape before forming the band. Who or what first got you into music?

BK: My Aunt Lou played me a tape of a Welsh choir when I was about 6 and I guess it got in there pretty deep, pretty powerful music. Neil Young taught me guitar, Bill Ward taught me drumming. I studied classical music at uni too, but it wasn’t much chop and crushed me into a tonal box from which I’m still trying to escape. Nahhh, I like tonality, it’s comforting. Anyway I’ve been in heaps of gross punk bands since I was 13, and one that was pretty good, and now I’m in RABBIT.

On your Instagram there was a vid of you playing guitar with the caption: upstrokes are for arseholes. Where does your love of the downstroke come from?

BK: It’s a worthy commitment! I got it from Dave Gibson (Funeral Moon/Spacebong/Ratcatcher). Dunno where he got it from but probably The Misfits or The Ramones or The Slayer [sic]. Have a look and a listen next time you watch a guitar band, upstrokes are so floppy and limp. There’s nothing worse than listening to limp floppy upstrokes, nothing, except like if you’re running back to your car because you’re two minutes overparked but as you get back the inspector is taking a photo and the ticket is there on your windscreen and you were too late, and you try to protest but the inspector just simpers at you, and then later you’re at the pub and there’s a band playing and IT’S HIM, THE INSPECTOR, and he’s playing third wave ska! That’s worse! But it’s the same thing! Also, the tone and attack of downstrokes rips.

photo by Scott Bradshaw

How did the band come to be? How did you meet each band member: Maggie Edwards (vocals), Sean Wyers (drums) and Claire Johnston (bass)?

BK: I was living in a sharehouse with Magz around the time I was recording the demo. My singing voice sounds like Leo Kottke’s farts on a muggy day, so I asked Magz to sing on it. Even her retching is sonorous. I think I met Clairey at the Brisbane Hotel one night and she put her name in my phone as ‘CLAIREY MEGABABE’. She’d heard the demo and was super keen, so we tried to get a band together with her on drums. I went overseas for work and it fizzed, and then she kicked it back into life last year, she put the word out and pulled it together with Sean on the kit. I’d met him a year before when I showed up at a rehearsal space for a weekly blast beat practice and his metal band had muscled in on my slot. They went to the pub for an hour while I sweated it out over his snare, and eventually I moved into his spare room. That’s how Hobart works. Clairey is still MEGABABE.

Each of the songs on Gone speak to various aspects of love and/or relationships. Can you tell us about the writing of ‘Gone Gone Gone’? What sparked it?

BK: The songs on the demo came out of a singularly painful and traumatic breakup, sort of diversionary processing tactic or something, dunno what was going on upstairs but I chucked it all into writing loud pop songs. Somebody in France was very kind to me when I was low, dusted me off as I was passing through so I stayed with them for a few weeks and eventually got a flight to Dublin and drank a million pints with my Da and then BANG, wrote a song about it. It’s in G major and it’s got a bunch of suspended 4ths which try to convey the feeling of vomiting in the rain in the front yard of a BnB while your Da takes photos of you from the rental car. Berlioz for the 21st century or whatever. Actually, the lyric in the chorus came out of a dream I had many years ago and I never knew what it meant but now I sort of do.

You made a film clip for ‘Gone Gone Gone’ directed by Joseph Shrimpton; what do you remember most from filming it?

BK: Shouting SHRIMPTON a bunch. I’d just met Jo that day and was pretty excited. They’re really nice! It was an easy film shoot – mostly I just lay on a mattress and read a book about chess while Clairey had a bath. Magz and Sean had an argument about a lamp. SHRIMPTON!

The songs were recorded with Zac Blain (A. Swayze and the Ghosts) in a sharehouse on Muwinina Country. How did the collaboration come about?

BK: We just asked the guy because he’s a ripper. We more or less all knew one another, so it was an easy thing to organise. Sean and I were living in the old sharehouse on Warwick Street (where the video was filmed), the neighbour screeched at us like a bat, Zac was an absolute pleasure and he gets where RABBIT comes from. He’s got cool spectacles.

Can you share with us some details of the recording of ‘Burnt’?

BK: More room mic and less close mic in the drum mix, Bonham style for Seans. Two almost identical guitar tracks panned L/R – one through a Fender Bassman and one through an Orange Rockerverb II, same set up for every song on the 7”. Clairey’s bass guitar signal attended the Zac Blain School of Wonderful Works and graduated with a Certificate III, and Maggie just sings everything perfectly, every time. That’s what she does.

How did the song ‘Love Bites’ change from the original demo version to the final recording version we hear? We especially love the dual vocals!

BK: Well, Love Bites wasn’t on the demo that went up on bandcamp, it was a later song that I demo’d after we’d started rehearsing. I recorded it really rough for the band to hear and Maggie filled in a missing verse. It still changed quite a bit from my demo to the band recording… the dual vocals are more contrapuntal on the 7”, I think on the demo it was more of a straight harmony. Clairey reworked the bass part and made it more harmonically colourful. Sean and I are very different drummers, so the drums were bound to feel different. I’m an absolute slop-fest octopus while Sean is much more precise with his fills. The brief I gave to Sean for Love Bites was “play it like Mitch Mitchell, y’know, like just put shit everywhere”, but Sean hits ’em harder and more solid than Mitchell, so there ya have it!

Photo by Scott Bradshaw

Rabbit are nipaluna/Hobart-based; what’s the best and worst bits about living where you are?

BK: Worst bit is how the gaming industry dominates pubs all around the state and there’s relatively few venues to support live music and there’s not much we can do about it.

The best bit is how everyone drives 10ks under the limit and the sky always looks like an ice-cream cake.

What’s one of the most memorable local shows you’ve attended or played and what made it so?

BK: We recently played at Junction Arts Festival in Launceston and after our gig we went and watched a friend’s band Broken Girl’s Club, and I was standing on the grass in the dark with Sean and he taps me on the shoulder and shouts over the music ‘OI, BOBBY LOOK AT THIS’ and I look down and he’s holding a handful of wriggling worms.

Ohhhh, also there was one at Altar where the sewage backed up and flooded out onto the dance floor and The Bonus didn’t get to play because it was a public health emergency.

What do you love about making music?

BK: It’s the only thing in the world that I ever want to do, and I GET TO DO IT.

What else should we know about you?
BK: I used to go for the dim sim but now I go straight for the corn jack.

RABBIT ‘Gone‘ 7 inch is available to order through Rough Skies Records.

Quicksand’s Walter Schreifels: “What we’ve been dealing with, even for the best of us, has been tough.”

| gimmiezine
Original photo by Annette Rodriguez. Handmade mixed-media by B.

There’s a heaviness, groove and beauty that simultaneously exists on NYC band Quicksand’s records. Distant Populations is the fourth studio album from the legendary post-hardcore outfit, who are sounding as passionate, and better, than ever. It’s narrative weaves through the complexities of simply existing and coping in the weird times we’re all sharing, and have been for the past couple of years. The album title comes from lyrics of song ‘Inversion’ which were inspired by a misheard lyric of anarcho-punk band, Nausea. Gimmie chatted with the always thoughtful guitarist-vocalist, Walter Schreifels, who has gifted the world so many shining moments through songs in iconic bands Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, CIV, Rival Schools, and more.

WALTER SCHREIFELS: I’m very happy to have the album out. It’s exciting! I’m psyched. I’m hoping that maybe next year we’ll get to travel again; we had so much fun in Australia.

That would be so great. I had so much fun at your last shows here. Congratulations on the new album, it’s tremendous.

WS: Thank you so much. I’m glad you like it; I really appreciate that. It feels really cool that we did all of this stuff to make this record and people are appreciating it, especially you, thank you.

What have you been up to today?

WS: I woke up and I went for a run. I came home, we had a house guest, she’s been helping us with some interior decorating, so we had some discussions about that. Then I had to go pick up an amp over in Brooklyn. I got a parking ticket, but I got my amp! Outside of that, I answered some emails, and went for a nice walk with my wife, we bought groceries. Pretty basic.

A part from the parking ticket, it seems like a pretty perfect day, doing a little of all the things you enjoy.

WS: That is exactly right.

What kinds of things were you discussing with the interior decorator? What kind of vibe does your home have?

WS: We moved apartments in May, so we’re just figuring this one out. Let me just adjust this [moves computer] you can see this big wall with no artwork on it, we’re figuring out what kind of art we want there. We were thinking a big piece, so we were talking about some kind of giant photograph or maybe a painting. We kept our old apartment and we’re subletting it, there’s a painting there that is just big enough, but the frame is a little warped. We’re going to take the canvas off the frame and just hang it flat, that’s our solution. It’s an abstract painting that a friend of mine did, it’s kind of a splatter painting, but it’s got some vibe to it and the colours are nice, so we’re going to try it out. I guess interior decorating is like that, you put something there and see if it sticks, if it does, cool; if not, it’s a work in progress.

Yeah, I think a home is always like that. It’s always in progress and it always evolves and changes, as you do. Our home’s walls are filled with art our friends have made, we’ve made or we have pieces from our favourite artists, and a lot of framed concert posters. I love having walls filled with things that make me happy, and when you walk past certain pieces, you’ll think of that person that made that for you or maybe when you got it or it might evoke a time in your life.

WS: I think that’s the best. Especially if you have some friend’s artwork and it radiates that, it’s really, really nice.

I know that for you as an artist, growth is always really important to you, and that for this album Distant Populations,it’s something you really wanted to focus on. How do you feel you’ve grown?

WS: From the experience of doing Interiors and touring – you and I first met when we were in Australia with Thursday – all of those experiences, going from not having recorded a record to making this record-comeback-thing, to touring the world and really doing it. Then we became a three-piece. I really grew as a player. The three of us carrying on also brought us a lot closer, and created a lot of movement—we really got each other’s back. We’ve always been good friends, but never more so than now.

That’s really nice.

WS: Making this album we went at it with a fair bit more confidence, because we had gone through all of that together. We built and process, so that if we were really stuck on something, which inevitably happens, we were confident that we would get through it without worrying about it too much. Which is a good place to be in a relationship, problems arise and challenges are there. A lot of the growth happened there, in the guts of it.

Stylistically we took more chances, for what that’s worth, we were less concerned with: are we living up to something? Are we being faithful to a legacy? We had a bit more of a free hand there, and I think we took advantage of it.

We obviously wanted to come out with something new that was faithful to our old records, but also reflective of who we are in the now. And, now we’re freer from that, which is nice. I’m grateful for all of it, to be honest. It’s cool.

When you started making Distant Populations what story did you want to tell?

WS: We wanted to be a little more succinct and punchier. With Interiors it was more expansive, moodier and soundscape-y. That was great for us and we were really successful with that, but having done that, we wanted things to be a little tighter; that was part of our goal. We were psyched if a song was under two minutes. If it was creeping over three, we were really wondering; why?

When I listen to the record, I don’t want to review my own album, but as much as I can be objective about it, I think it holds you in. I’ve heard the songs plenty of times. I’ll be like, how does that song sound? I’ll listen to it and the next song will start and I’ll be like, oh shit, I wanna hear this song now. It’s gets to the point without rushing. It was always fun, we didn’t have to labour it, in that regard.

Album art by Tetsunori Tawaraya.

For me that’s when some of the best art happens, when it’s not tortured and laboured over too much. There’s magic in spontaneity and immediacy. I think you can work on something for too long, to the point where the heart and the spirit that made it shine, is gone.

WS: For sure! We figured out our process and if we hit those stumbling blocks where it’s not fun, we would just shake it off and do something else; we let it simmer. You can’t force it. We were pretty good about that. In the end we were listening back and making our comments, and we were all cooperative about it. It was really nice. We were laughing—there’s fun in it.

The album art work by Japanese artist Tetsunori Tawaraya is especially fun! I noticed that between the artwork as well as some of the songs like ‘Katakana’ (which is a Japanese syllabary) and ‘Rodan’ (a winged-monster from 1950s Japanese monster movies), that there’s a bit of a Japanese connection.

WS: There’s a love of Japan shared throughout the band. Initially when we were talking about the artwork, Sergio [Vega] sent this Japanese artist from the early 70’s through and it was this monster motif; we couldn’t really contact the artist. I knew Tetsunori Tawaraya’s artwork and said, this is an artist that is kind of in the same vibe, but he’s an illustrator and working now, he’s alive and my friend is friends with him. We wanted it to be fun.

Interiors’ art work, I love it, I think it’s so cool, but it’s got this spaciousness and trippiness to it. Tetsunori’s work has this monster funness about it and it’s a good image to project this music on to for the music to live in. We wanted to create a Star Wars-esque saga for our music to live in, where there’s this protagonist, this dude with a staff, and then there’s monsters and stuff like that. And, the lyrical themes of the songs could exist in a fantastical world. So, you can escape the sort of bullshit; typically, the way things play out in our contemporary discussions of how the world is going; how we’re feeling; how we’re coping…to have it exist in that world instead. To keep it fun like that.

As far as the Japanese thing, ‘Rodan’ was just a working title. I tried to find out, what am I writing about in regards to Rodan? To me it ended up being about being humble, being small, and how you contest with outside forces that are beyond your control, like a force of nature, like Rodan this giant thing that could kill you, or you could be swept up in its wind. Being small. Being humble. Not trying to attack that.

With ‘Katakana’ I think it is so interesting how the Japanese have these different character alphabets for their language. Japanese culture is so interesting, that for western music, especially from my generation, it’s now spread quite a bit across Asia, where there’s this cross-culturalisation where people in Japan appreciate western music, and it’s becoming more so that western people appreciate music from Asia. For me, Japan is the place that I am most familiar with. That’s pretty much where it came from, it wasn’t like, ‘let’s just do Japan!’ I was kind of just in our vibe, we always love going there, it’s awesome.

I’ve always wanted to go to Japan. I love so much about Japanese culture; I have since I was a kid. My old punk zine was reviewed by Maximum Rock N Roll once and the reviewer said, “You’d think this girl was Japanese” because I used to have a lot of Japanese-inspired art in the zine.

WS: Yeah, that artwork is cool. Japanese somehow just do everything right. Aesthetically they’re so on point.

Before you mentioned that sometimes there’s things outside of yourself that you don’t have control over, I was thinking about that a lot with the global pandemic, lockdowns and life changing. Watching the news most days, I was realising that a lot of it is designed to make you fearful and keep you coming back, keep you looking at it, there’s a whole cycle that can keep you feeling down. It was getting me down, as it was a lot of people, and I decided to take a step back and look at what it was in my life that I can control. I’ve found that helpful. What are some things that have helped you in these weird times?

WS: That’s what a lot of the record is about—how I’m coping. This is before Covid, because honestly the lyrics were written before all of this stuff. It’s beautiful that you and I can talk over Zoom, and it’s so cool to see you, but our communication is over soon… we’re losing some of our humanity. Our humanity is evolving at a very fast pace, and that’s scary. People are looking for simple answers, but there’s not really simple answers to all of that. I feel that through music, art, your family, friends, nature, you can find that humility. Through exercise, moving your body, yoga, breathing, meditating, you can find that grounding and you can cope with all that shit that’s coming at you. The fear, it’s really terrible that the cyclical nature of it is that people are addicted to it, and not through their own fault, it doesn’t make anybody bad; people are making money off of addicting you, it’s like cigarettes.

It’s important for me personally, to notice that I am like that too. What does it do for my soul? What do I then carry out into the world? What fears am I projecting because I’m eating it up? I’m like most people [laughs]. I’m pretty much exactly like, most people. I’m dealing with this stuff; how can I get a handle on it? A lot of the stuff in the lyrics is touching on that, sometimes specifically and sometimes in a really broad way.

I told you that I went for a run this morning. When I go for a run, I’m up early in the morning. I live right near Chinatown. I see all the woman fan dancing in the morning and everyone doing Tai Chi. I go run by the river, I see all the other runners running around and all of the boats are going by on the East River – the East River has been there forever. Connecting to those things in the morning puts me in a positive state of mind. It’s easier for me to weather, not just the news, but the stuff that happens, and to be stronger for it, because it just will continue to come; we have to evolve with it and make it through. What we’ve been dealing with, even for the best of us, has been tough.

Like we’ve been talking about, all of the things that we can do to build a strong foundation within ourselves, really does help to cope and in dealing with things.

WS: For sure. You have to take care of yourself to be effective. You have to rest. You have to be good to yourself. You see it, people are just aggravated at each other, aggravated in their own world and it’s coming out… it just seems like anything comes across the plate, people are looking to dissect it in some way that someone else is bad or someone else is ruining it or someone else is against you or someone has to be defeated. Everything seems to be sliced up in those ways and that makes people aggressive. Everyone’s eating that up, whether they want to or not. Some people are probably very disengaged or maybe more elevated in their consciousness and are able to process it more easily. I think it’s something that everybody is dealing with. I am. I’m part of it.

You mentioned meditation; is that something you do?

WS: I don’t meditate, but my wife does. I feel like I should be meditating. I do yoga, which I feel is a breathing meditation. Running is a meditation for me. Meditation is where you’re taking your mind and directing it and working on that muscle. I haven’t gotten into it, but I feel like it’s sitting there for me, like jazz [laughs], I have to dig in a little deeper than I have been.

Was there anything on the record that was challenging?

WS: It’s always challenging in the sense that you want to do your best work. It’s a collective, so you always have to work within that collective. You have to be kind and humble to other people, and you have to get your ideas across. You have to dig deep from yourself, but you also have to know when not to try that hard. These are all challenges. Once you’re going to make a new Quicksand record the first thing is—this thing better be fucking good! It’s not going to be a cakewalk.

As I was saying before, I feel really good about my bandmates and how we handle those challenges, so I have a lot less anxiousness. When a struggle does come, it becomes more of an adventure of, how do we get through it?

Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

WS: I sure hope with all the [Covid] variants crossing the world, I hope we figure this out and get a chance to come back to Australia, because we’d love to see you, and get out there and play again, I’m looking forward to that.

That’s the dream. I hope it happens sooner rather than later. Did you miss playing live?

WS: The first year, not that much, to be honest. I didn’t miss going to the airport. I really appreciated just being in one place, because I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager, so every single year of my life has been travel every year, all the time. It was ok to take a break. I’m not going crazy or anything, but I do feel when I go to these different countries and I see people that I’ve met and have friendships with, and cities that I love to see, I do feel that they are part of my home and who I am too. My friendships with these people and my relationships with these cities are a part of me, so I am missing going to Australia, going to Japan, I’m missing my friends in Europe and across the United States. Overall, it’s been ok and, in many ways, awesome to take a rest. I’m ready to hit it again!

Is there anything you do that gives you the same feeling you get when you play live?

WS: Going for a run can be like that, especially trail running, because every time that you put your foot down, you get a different height or texture, you might have to duck under a branch, so your brain is having to fire quickly. At the same time, you get into a trance. When I’m playing, you’re very present. All these different little things are happening and your brain is just doing them and telling your where to go, in the same way your foot knows where to step during a run. Of course, when I stop running, there’s not a bunch of people clapping for me [laughs]. And, I’m not going to talk to that many people after the run about what a cool run it was! I miss the exchange of seeing people, not so much the applause (although I do like applause)—that communication.

For all things Quicksand please check out: quicksandnyc.com. Distant Populations is out now on Epitaph Records.