INTERVIEW: Georgia Nott talks Broods' fourth studio album 'Space Island': "What I was trying to do with this album was to find some love for myself again."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Jeremy Reynoso & Oscar Keys
Creative direction: Silken Weinberg
Brother-sister duo Broods (aka Georgia and Caleb Nott) are without doubt one of the greatest musical acts to emerge from New Zealand in the past decade. After first breaking through in 2014 with their internationally successful debut EP Broods and album Evergreen they have gone from strength to strength, both as recording and live artists, with their creativity and sheer brilliance growing and expanding with every release.
Today sees the release of their fourth studio album Space Island and it is arguably their best release to date. Originating from the grief Georgia experienced when her marriage broke down, ending in divorce in 2019, she turned to songwriting to process her emotions, resulting in the album being the most honest, emotional and raw collection of music they have ever recorded.
Grief, heartache and an all-consuming sense of loss wend their way through the album and while the lyrics and Nott’s vocals hit you fully in the heart, the sonics are so wide-ranging and expertly created that you walk away with not only a sense of hope and renewal but with the music fully impressed upon your soul.
There is an experimental feel to the songs - Caleb purchased a Farfisa organ specifically for the album - they still remaining completely authentically Broods. There is a heavy electro-synth feel to much of the album, with excursions into trance, R&B, guitar and acoustic inspired pop, all injected with an at times surreal, otherworldly quality which ties in with the 1960’s, sci-fi B movie vibe portrayed in the music videos for the album’s singles.
Sonically, the album brings the heavy beats at the very beginning, with the uplifting, 1980s-synthy ‘Piece Of My Mind’ followed by the sultry, R&B tinged ‘Heartbreak’ and the glitchy electro of ‘Distance and Drugs’. Tove Lo joins on the trancey ‘I Keep’, with its repetitive vocal ‘I keep’ emphasising the mental turmoil and breakdown grief can create.
While still retaining an electronic core, the second half of the album is quieter, more introspective, Third single ‘Like A Woman’ is still as magnificent as ever with its sparse soundscape erupting into a clash of sounds towards the end. ‘Gas Light’ is a tender, stripped back ballad with a remarkable, vulnerable vocal from Georgia heartbreakingly detailing the messy breakdown of a relationship: ‘Don’t walk out on me this way / Tell me you don’t really mean the things you say’. Album closer ‘If You Fall In Love’ is a highlight, with a more traditional pop sound, gorgeous shimmery beats and delicious melodies and sees the story come full circle as Georgia considers love again: ‘Forgive me if I run away / I never want to make you chase / I lose my faith, I change my mind / But my baby you take me every time’.
Broods are a band who never fail to impress with music that is smart, confident, intriguing and completely immersive. They make music to be listened to as an experience, and with Space Island they have excelled themselves with what must surely be a contender for one of the best albums of 2022. We recently sat down with Georgia Nott to find out more about the album’s creation.
Hi Georgia it is so lovely to see you, thank you very much for your time. You always make incredible things, but I want to talk to you about your latest incredible thing Space Island. It is something else and I was sold on the visuals alone. Before I talk too much, can you talk me through the creation of this incredible album?
We wrote pretty much all of it before the pandemic, and spent the pandemic just really diving into production. It basically started as most albums do, just as we'd finished the last one! We just finished touring Don't Feed The Pop Monster and I went through quite a lot of changes, pre Pop Monster release. I got divorced, which is what this whole album is about and the wider theme of grief and grieving. It set me on a wild goose chase to try and understand my emotions. I read a lot of books about grief and mindfulness and this whole album was me putting everything that I've learned along the way into something that made me feel like I took a picture of the whole experience. Caleb was really, really supportive the whole way through, letting me express myself pretty intensely and not really getting too involved in the themes of it. He kind of went crazy on the production instead! We just really let each other express what we needed to express, everybody's been through grief.
We got to the end of it and realised it was a very heavy and personal thing to release, so we wanted to take a little bit of the pressure off ourselves by making these really fun visuals. We spent a lot of time at the beginning of the pandemic watching sci fi movies and smoking a lot of weed! And just having big brainstorms around the house because we couldn't really do anything.
We got our friend Sam Kristofski to come in, he's also from Nelson where we are from and we grew up together. He's always wanted to make a sci-fi-esque film and we just kind of did it along the way, as we went, building the story and talking heaps about what the album was about while we were shooting. It was quite a long process and very much ‘trust the process as it goes’ and just try and not hold too tightly to any outcome. The way that it turned out, I had to like lie down every time I got a new edit because I was like ‘oh my god it's happening the way that I wanted it to happen! It's all turned out honestly so much better than I ever could have imagined. It's really special and quite overwhelming. It's probably the most emotional I've ever been about any release and that’s really hard, but at the same time, it's really rewarding. The most rewarding.
It’s definitely worth it and worth the sentiment. It is an almost playful imagery to go with it. You've approached this with so much intelligence because, there's nothing lonelier than space, it's the loneliest place in the world! Caleb’s sonics just compliments those lyrics and those vocals so perfectly on an album that plays out like a novel, it’s incredible. Did the the visuals being so otherworldly, and also the song titles, did that act as kind of a comforter when you were dealing with something that was so bleeding heart raw?
I think it always does. Ever since I started writing songs, I have a lot of cryptic ways of talking about my emotions. I was saying to somebody the other day, songwriting was my diary that I knew no one could read, because I made it into something that only I could understand or something that kept the most personal parts of it just for me. And this album has not done that! It's ‘here's how I feel and this is what I’ve been through, be nice to me, please’. So doing the fun visuals is just so comforting. This theme of space, a lot of people get so excited about the concept of space at the same time as being really scared of it. That's really similar to grief, grief is this unknown territory. As much as we know that death is a part of life, or that loss is a part of life, it is so important to learn how to live your life and learn how to prioritise your values and understand what really means something. There's a lot that takes you away from yourself in your life and there's so much that puts pressure on you to be something that might not really be true or authentic and grief just rips you back to it. It’s like being in a massive accident where the shock of it switches the pathways in your brain to see things differently. When you have the support that you need around grief or any kind of loss and you have ways to transmute it and metabolise it you end up coming so much closer to yourself, and becoming a better person to other people. I truly believe when you're encouraged to be yourself, it is so much easier to love other people, it becomes effortless. That's basically what I was trying to do with the album, trying to find some love for myself again. I don't know what other people are gonna think about this but this feels so us, it feels so special and I can't wait to see who connects with it and what other little emotional nerdy people like us are out there!
It hits the mark and it's beautiful. And I love the order of play, you've got ‘Goodbye World, Hello Space Island’, opening up and then ‘If You Fall In Love’ at the end, which almost plays out melodically, as well as lyrically, like the light at the end of a black hole. It seems like the song is that full circle back to self love.
Yeah. I did really, really want it to tuck people in and give them a little kiss on the head at the end, you know? I didn't want it to be just like full on sad. We have always been really excited about tracklisting, it’s so fun. Sequencing the album is one of my favourite things and I do it over and over. With whatever demos we have, I will tracklist right through the whole process. We landed on this tracklisting and I'm like ‘it's done, this is it, this is the final Space Island story.' I wanted it to be this thing where people could run off a lot of their shit, work it out or dance it out or rage it out and then at the end of it feel like ‘I'm held, I'm okay and I'm actually processing this shit.’ Who would have thought that processing stuff helps? Crazy!
It's important because clearly you're making music that you've always needed to hear. And at this moment in time in your life, you're like ‘you know what we've danced it out, we've rocked it out. I'm still screaming I just need to be tucked in, can we make a song that's a tuck in?’
Honestly, you know when we go to a show or something really exciting happens, or something really traumatic happens, we become little kids again. And when you're a little kid what do you need? You need to express yourself, you need to move your body and you need to feel supported by a community.
I wanted to ask you about the track ‘Like A Woman’. Oh my god, the almost choral intro and then it's just you and the organ in a kind of floatation bath. And then you've got the line ‘but I never felt like a woman to you’. If you don't mind, can you talk me through this track?
We were actually in a session with another artist when I just sat down while they were in the control room and I was feeling really good. It's so funny that when I feel really good, I write these songs. It's only when I'm feeling really calm and open that I can write about these really heavy things. The song itself just fell out of me a little bit. I remember after I wrote it I was like ‘cracked it!’ I knew why it was never going to work with this person, because a woman to me is really powerful, really magical, really spiritual and I didn't feel like that. It's as simple as that. The things that women are able to do when they are empowered, and supported and encouraged are so helpful to the world. I feel like I've become a much better person since I've been able to embrace that, and being able to attract people that like that, and support that and help that grow. Whenever I hear that track, it still makes me feel really tense. It gives me this motivation to really be honest.
it's incredible and I'm so pleased that you put it on the album because it's something that everyone needs to hear. Everyone needs to hear this agenda. It's a really important song and I can imagine that it’s quite tender to sing, and you're going to be playing it live, as well!
It's so funny, because so much of the actual residual emotions that I feel come out when I play live, it's that whole thing of physically getting it out. Writing the song is great, but dancing every night to it, and screaming it and feeling other people respond to it, that's when I really get to let it go. Leave it and not forget but forgive that part of my life. Let it be turned into something positive and constructive. I'm really, really nervous, but also really, really excited to play that one live because that's when I am really going to feel like what I just said. I'm gonna feel really powerful and big and I'm going to take up space. I'm learning to do that a little bit more these days, but it's still hard. It's really hard as a woman to rewire yourself to put down those habits of martyrdom and feeling like you have to look to other people to protect you, often men, and really let yourself be all these different versions, shamelessly, that everybody has inside them.
You have always done things for the women and the girls in your life. It’s really incredible of you to mention that regardless of all these women that you support, and you're supported by you, you still felt incredibly small.
It’s something that I'm learning. And as much as it helps to have people supporting me, and validating me, what really brings it home is how I see myself and how I take care of myself, and what I allow myself to feel without feeling guilty, what I allow myself to think and be attracted to. Simple, self discovery just gets so blocked by other people's need for you to be what they want you to be. It always leads to really shitty stuff like bad mental health, and bad relationships, and a bad relationship with yourself. Everybody should feel like they deserve to go on that journey and find who they are and change their mind about what they like and who they think they are.
For a really long time, I didn't really think that that was something I'd ever get, or that I deserved to get. And so that's my mission now, to do that. If I can do that, and I can make art about it, then that will help that attitude of finding an authentic version of oneself and letting that lead you to deeper love and richer experiences and a healthier wealthier life, but not in a money sense. I'm just gonna try to do that for a while, the next few years I might change!
And in doing so leading by example, I think it's incredible. I'm really pleased you also mentioned that it's healthy to change your mind because we do have to. Georgia, I'm so excited to see this album touring, what can we expect from that?
We're building the show at the moment. It's really exciting. We have built quite a few shows now, we've been doing it for a while so we know what we can do with the show. We’re like ‘what story do we want to tell what do we want the opening scene to be’ and really building the Space Island energy into the show. I'm really pumped for that, I'm already starting to buy all my outfits which is very exciting for me! It's going to be really fun, really emotional and hopefully it's going to be a good escape, like a church that doesn't give you heaps of oppressive roles. A place to be spiritual and a place to get shit out in a place where you feel held by a community, that's all I want the shows to be.
I'm so excited to see the giant female energy on stage. I will be there. Georgia thank you so much for your time today and thank you for such a hands down top to bottom incredible album.
You have no idea how much that means to me. I just want to cry right now!
Space Island is out now via Island Records. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Broods, you can follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Broods are touring Australia in April, with dates re-scheduled from March. Tickets on sale nowusic.com
‘Space Island’ Australian tour
April 26 – Metro Theatre, Sydney (previously Fri Mar 25)
April 27 – Brisbane, The Triffid (previously Wed Mar 23)
April 28 – Melbourne, 170 Russell (previously Thu Mar 31)
North America Dates
May 20 – Antone’s, Austin, TX *
May 21 – The Loft, Dallas, TX *
May 22 – Warehouse Live, Houston, TX *
May 24 – The Basement East, Nashville, TN *
May 25 – Terminal West, Atlanta, GA *
May 27 – Union Stage, Washington, DC *
May 28 – Irving Plaza, New York, NY *
May 29 – The Foundry, Philadelphia, PA *
May 31 – The Sinclair, Boston, MA *
June 1 – L’Astral, Montreal, QC, Canada *
June 2 – AXIS Club, Toronto, ON, Canada *
June 4 – Fine Line, Minneapolis, MN *
June 5 – Park West, Chicago, IL *
June 7 – Bluebird Theatre, Denver, CO *
June 8 – Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City, UT *
June 10 – Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver, BC, Canada **
June 11 – Neumos, Seattle, WA **
June 12 – Hawthorne Theatre, Portland, OR **
June 14 – The Independent, San Francisco, CA **
June 15 – El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles, CA **
* with Ella Vos
** with Tei Shi
