New Slag Queens’: “A weird album for a weird time”

14th Jul 202214th Jul 2022 | gimmiezine

Original photo: Isabelle Gander. Handmade collage by B.

Gimmie are super excited that nipaluna band Slag Queens have new music! We’re touting their forthcoming record Favours as one of the records of the year. Three years in the making, grittier than debut, You Can’t Go Out Like That, their sophomore album ventures into new territory, full of intriguing weird, and beautiful pulsating moments, but it’s unmistakably Slag Queens. It’s an exuberant listen that feels very much of this moment. First Single ‘Dogs’ is one of their most impressive turns yet. We’re premiering the song and clip today—check it out for yourself.

You recently played at MONA in Ben Salter’s Import/Export installation space; tell us about it.

WESLEY: That was really heaps of fun! I also helped mix the space over Dark Mofo and it was a pretty huge marathon! On the day we played I think most of us were a bit fragile from the night before, I was a bit worried but then it turned into a really fun show!

CLAIREY: Yep, I nearly asked for a sick bucket next to my drums. When he reached out to us about playing, I asked if we could play later in the day because we all had party plans on Friday night. He said 12noon with Bloody Mary’s or nuthin. We made it. First couple of songs were pretty shaky but I think we pulled it off! Big thanks to Ben for having us.

Since your last album You Can’t Go Out Like That Slag Queen’s debut record, Lucinda and Claire moved south from Launceston to nipaluna/Hobart; how did the move change things for you? Did it spark new creativity? How does where you live affect your art?

CLAIREY: Lucy and I moved down in 2018. Lucy moved in with Wesley in Lenah Valley and I took the small loft in Amber’s share house in North Hobart. I loved Launceston, but it was time to do the cliche thing and embrace the pull south. Slags had really found a home in the community that centred around The Brisbane Hotel and contemporary arts spaces like Visual Bulk and Good Grief Studios. Those spaces have been so inspiring for me creatively and important for finding a community, sense of belonging etc. Shit’s been weird since The Bris closed – we’re all a bit lost. Reflecting on You Can’t Go Out Like That, it really was an album with something to say about Launceston. Favours is noisier and darker but I’ll fight anyone who wants to trot out a boring ‘Hobart is dark’ analysis. You’ve drunk the corporate paganism kool-aid, kid.

Slag Queens have a new album Favours coming out in August and it’s your first release in a few years; what are your feelings about it at this point?

WESLEY: I’m super excited! Having joined the band just after wear thus for you was released it was an interesting experience touring an album I wasn’t on, and it’s been such a long time I the making and I think we’re all really proud of it and cant wait to start showing it to everyone.

LUCINDA: Agree with Wesley! It’s been so long coming and it’s been really special writing new music with Wes and Amber. I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished together!

CLAIREY: Also excited and a bit nervous!

Why did you decide to name it Favours?

LUCINDA: We called it Favours for a few reasons. Favours has this delightfully camp air to it, and it puts us in mind of the idea of a ‘favourite’ at court or in a race, the idea that luck is behind you, but its rarely luck is it? It’s more that you’ve somehow convinced or charmed someone powerful and now you’re it baby and enjoy it while you can because you might not be tomorrow!

A favour itself is interesting too, because a favour is something that doesn’t have clear rules about it. It’s both something you can do freely or because you owe someone something. It gets me thinking about the favours we do for bosses, for family, for gender, for patriarchy. Can we stop doing these favours? What happens when we stop?

It was written and recorded over three years. When did you first start writing for this album? Last we spoke you said you do songwriting quite collaboratively with everyone in the same room, which at the time was the shed out the back of Claire and Amber’s house.

CLAIREY: Yep, that’s right! This album was written and partially recorded in the shed out the back of Amber’s (I’ve moved since we last spoke). Not gunna lie, it’s pretty chaotic in there, but it also feels so comfortable. Maybe that also describes our band dynamic? Most songs were written between 2019-2020 very collaboratively with everyone in the shed supervised by a life-sized Keanu Reeves cardboard cut-out. ‘Dogs’ and ‘Excuses’ were both songs we had written and discarded years ago, but got resurrected and reimagined.

What kinds of things were happening in your life that inspired it? Where was your head at when writing it? I understand that a lot of lyrics came from looking inward and Lucinda described it as “Angsty. Itchy. Frustrated.”

LUCINDA: Some of the lyrics are drawn from watching TV, film, reading books, which I guess the last few years has given us all a new appreciation for. Like ‘Mood of Abandon’ is based on the feeling of watching the first season of Russian Doll. That sense of doing the same thing again and again and never being able to break out of patterns, and the kicking, screaming frustration of not being master of your own destiny. That feeling in Russian Doll is just so familiar to me and it certainly has been peaking at times over the last few years. Even though it sucks, it’s a feeling with an energy that lends itself to writing.

And I guess it’s a feeling that’s both personal (why can’t I be better, why do I make the same mistakes again and again?) and about politics (are we still here talking about whether we should do something about climate change? About job seeker? About our completely fucked and unfair migration system?) I don’t like to be pessimistic about these things because nihilism is a cop out and we owe it to each other to sort this shit out. But i certainly feel like the lyrics on this album are reflective of a level of tiredness that I hadn’t encountered before.

Is music cathartic for you?

LUCINDA: Listening, writing and playing music absolutely yes 1000 times yes. Recording on the other hand is death by a 1000 cuts.

WESLEY: To be honest I’m mostly listening to 00s hardcore and alt-metal at the moment. So yes.

AMBER: I keep asking myself this but it’s been 15 years and I keep performing music so there’s definitely something cathartic in the process that keeps me coming back.

CLAIREY: It’s the best and worst thing in my life.

What is the strangest thing or thought that has inspired a piece of work?

LUCINDA:It’s not on this record, but we recently wrote a song inspired by a mythical search for Neil Diamond which was inspired by a sheet of karaoke songs that was on the floor of the shed.

WESLEY: Truth be told, that shed probably inspires most of our songs, it’s great.

The album was recorded and mixed by Jordan Marson at Studio HMY with additional recording by the band in various sharehouses across nipaluna/Hobart; what was it like to be back in the studio and what did also recording in sharehouse spaces bring to the recording?

CLAIREY: It was great to work with Jordy again. We learnt a lot recording You Can’t Go Out Like That with him and wanted to continue working together. We’re such a funny bunch with recording – we really struggle with it hey! We started recording with Jordy in his home studio back in 2019. We worked on ‘Shelter’, ‘Hazard’, ‘Shades’ and ‘Best Western’. In retrospect, those songs were super new at that stage and maybe needed a bit more time in the world before we recorded them. After that we decided to buy a bunch of gear and give things a go ourselves while Covid was happening. Home recording was both a necessity and comfort for us. It allowed us to take more time, experiment and be in familiar settings, which I think helped remove some of the pressure of recording. We went back into the studio with Jordy to finish off the last tracks in late 2021.

Are there any moments recording or wiring that you feel like you really got to play or experiment on the record?

WESLEY: Personally, quite a bit. I’d done a few noise performances before joining Slag Queens. Everyone else seems to be pretty okay with me bringing that into our songs, although I do struggle when it comes to locking things in. I think ‘Dogs’ was definitely the one that we had a lot of fun putting together.

How did you stretch yourself with this collection of songs?

WESLEY: Yoga. I’d say we’re all pretty flexible so nothing felt like too much of a stretch, except that one thing…

AMBER: It feels like less of a happy go lucky punk album, more grit, and more allowing ourselves to lean into some atonal weird sounds without feeling like things need to sound like other bands. It’s a weird album for a weird time.

CLAIREY:I hate yoga.

There seems to be a lot of fascinating sounds on you record, from what we’ve seen from live videos online and the film clip for ‘Dogs’ we’re premiering, it’s courtesy of what Wesley is doing with a stereo, drills and various things, we’d love to know more about this; what’s happening there?

WESLEY: It’s really cool! Grab an AM radio and essentially anything, like infrared remotes, small engines, big engines, tools, kitchen appliances, modems, camera flash, and they all get picked up by the radio, and you’re able to affect pitch and tone in heaps of different ways!

What’s ‘Dogs’ about?

LUCINDA: Sex, thugs and working conditions. They don’t really go together thematically but oh well.

WESLEY: I think they fit.

Jo Shrimpton shot the video. Where did you shoot the film clip? What do you remember from the shoot? Do you ever feel awkward making a video?

LUCINDA: We shot it beneath the Tasman Bridge in nipaluna. We had all these plans about using car headlights to light us up but we didn’t need them because it’s so brightly lit under there. My main memory was freezing my tits off. I do feel generally awkward when shooting but that particular night was quite a lol and it was actually really nice to have this big space to run around in, and to be wearing an outfit I really liked and also to know that I wasn’t alone coz the rest of the band was there looking hot.

AMBER: Once you’re in a location that speaks for itself, it’s easier to feel like you’re more of a piece of set decoration and you can let go of some of the ego or insecurities attached to being filmed. You’re just one piece of a larger picture.

The album art is by Laura Gillam is cool; how did you connect for the cover? What’s the story behind it?

CLAIREY: Huge shout out to Laura for painting a smiling turd on the front cover! A past housemate had one of Laura’s paintings – another fallen patriarch, this time a cowboy being pulled off his bucking horse by a thylacine. Personally, I felt an affinity with Laura’s work because it’s a bit silly, highly political and has a strong look. It was a pretty simple process – we all knew Laura, she and Wes both had studios at Good Grief. I hit her up and she approached us with the idea of doing a fallen Colonial red coat with his horse pissing on his stuff (that’s on the back). I like that she included a pineapple with his stuff – we’ve used pineapples a couple of other times in our art.

Is there anything else any of you are working on at the moment you’d like to share with us?

CLAIREY: Amber and Wes have a little band performing at the upcoming nipaluna/Hobart Little Bands #8. Amber is also still performing as Slumber and Dolphin. Lucy has been working on a solo project which is sick. I’m downstroking bass till by hand falls off in RABBIT – we just finished an album. We’re all always working day jobs.. Except for Amber who recently quit hers to study carpentry.

Directed by Jo Shrimpton (Flare Production).

Slag Queens’ Favours will be out mid-August on Rough Skies Records. Follow @slagqueens and @roughskies

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

1st Oct 2021 | 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.

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!

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.