INTERVIEW: Hannah Joy on new Middle Kids album 'Faith Crisis Pt 1': "It's acknowledging so much of our brokenness and dysfunction, but we still have a choice and the ability to make moments of good."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 16 February 2024
When it comes to the inspiration behind album names, they can be obscure, literal or a representation of real events. For the third album from Sydney indie trio Middle Kids Faith Crisis Pt 1 it was definitely a case of the latter, with the title summing up lead singer and songwriter Hannah Joy’s lived experience.
With a new born baby in the middle of the pandemic, Joy felt her life was falling apart. With the lack of control and the reassurance everything would work okay completely gone, she faced her own faith crisis head on. “It’s extremely painful and stressful,” she says. “You have to figure out how to respond to that – whether you deconstruct what you believe or just live in the tension.”
It resulted in Joy suffering writers block, which stuck to her until time spent in a holiday house on the New South Wales coast brought inspiration back. Appropriately, the first song she wrote was ‘Terrible News’, an indiepop gem with a splash of new wave that sees Joy shout out her anxieties and frustrations, opening the emotional floodgates that feel like both a rage unleashed and a joyful release. “I can’t take it / Tell me is it over soon?”
Co-produced by Jonathan Gilmore and Joy’s band mate (and husband) Tim Fitz, Faith Crisis Pt 1 was recorded in the UK over six weeks and Joy says the production and sounds on the album are the best the band has ever made. It is a remarkable album with the familiar Middle Kids indiepop sound, but elevated, stronger while also bringing in subtly different sonics which bring a freshness and further layers to their music. First single ‘Bootleg Firecracker’ is perhaps the perfect example, with its gentle, almost lazy beat and Joy’s lush vocals it has a hint of country about it which transforms into electronic swirls at the end. It expertly treads a fine line between being sonically interesting whilst also maintaining a beguiling simplicity.
Opening track ‘Petition’ has an insistent electronic beat which brings to mind the lo-fi synthpop sound of the early 1980s, while ‘Philosophy’ also has moments of the new wave, post punk sound but brings brash electric guitars next to a brighter, lighter pop sound.
‘Highlands’, perhaps more than any other song on the album, sonically reflects the chaos, angst and struggles that inspired the album, with discordant sounds playing against Joy’s repeated, frustrated vocal ‘I need a change’, a disheartened rage that is also present on fourth single ‘Bend’, a simmering anger that ominously builds up throughout the song. ‘My mind’s a parasite / And it’s eating me alive / I am one bend away from a break’ Joy sings.
Alongside the tracks that sonically convey the sensations of a crisis of faith, there are also moments of beauty, reflection and acceptance. With every struggle, comes the power of discovery and strength. ‘Go To Sleep On Me’ is a fuzzy, indie gem and ‘Your Side, Forever’ is a beautiful song that acknowledges that the struggle is a necessary part of the journey: “I know I’m doing it the hard way / But I kind of believe in the hard way.”
Faith Crisis Pt 1 is a magnificent album that is powerful in its message and deeply connective in its music. There is a compelling quality to the rawness, honesty and relatability of Joy’s lyrics that really bonds you to the album. It is a challenging subject matter, but it is delivered with such authenticity and lack of artifice that makes it almost an enlightening experience. Faith Crisis Pt 1 is arguably Middle Kids finest moment to date and will live long in your soul after the last note plays. We recently caught up with Joy to chat all about the album’s creation.
Hi Hannah! First of all, congratulations on Faith Crisis Pt 1 . This is really an album where you're getting past, and trying to inspire joy despite the fact that everything is not amazing.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I like that!
Talk to me about this beast.
It kind of grew in its own way. I didn't have a clear vision of what I was going to make from the beginning, it just slowly grew. It started from a few little songs towards the end of covid. I don't feel like it's a covid record. I barely wrote in covid actually, I found that time a not very fruitful time creatively. Even though I was like ‘oh my gosh we’re not touring’, we spend so much of the time on the road, I was like, ‘this is going to be amazing’. And it was not amazing! So it took me a while to get some of my flow back. I'm quite an extroverted artist in terms of I need a lot of input to then be able to examine myself and examine what's going on. I don't find that is easy for me to do in isolation or in a vacuum, I get a lot of energy from being out in the world. So I found that time not very inspiring and also I probably was just in survival mode. It was hard to make art when I'm just trying to survive, and I just had a kid too. It was a strange time. And then one by one, I started finding these songs. I often find that I’m disconnected from my emotions a lot of time, and then I'll start writing the songs and I'm like, 'wait, that's going on?’ It's almost a little sign to myself that maybe I need to look into this thing.
It started becoming very clear so much of what I was writing about was this wrestle of belief and hope and a lot of that being challenged, or my preconceived ideas being broken down. The pain of that, and the confusion but then the call to be brave and keep pushing and not hiding. Calling the album Faith Crisis felt a little intense for us, it’s an intense phrase but that just feels like what this is, and you start to realise that we're all having these crises all the time, and that's just a part of life. You have an idea, and then you have an experience that does not fit with that idea and you have to then reckon and create a new thesis. I really love the way this album came together because I felt like it came from a very raw, real journey and it's a true expression of the last few years for me personally, but also for us as a band.
I think it's gorgeous, and you guys do that so incredibly pretty well. You never pull back lyrically, and you never pull back with a sound and even when it hits hard it's a beautiful thing. You mentioned the intensity of the title, and the album opens with the almost anxious pulse of ‘Petition’, which just sets the theme perfectly. Was it always your intention to open with that track?
Yeah, because it's so short as well and part of me feels a bit of regret that we didn't turn it into more of a three minute song. But because of the length, it just this moment of tension the whole time, and then there's a bit of release at the end, it just felt like a really cool way to set up the record, this is where we're beginning. Once we decided just to keep it at a minute and a half, it felt like a really cool album opener.
It does, and also in the sense of you even have a couple of instrumentals that when they come in, it feels like it's a moment to just take stock of the last couple of conversations, which were the songs preceding them. I wanted to know when when you chose to put those in, was that the intention in mind? Like everyone just take a seat and a breath.
Yeah, because a lot of the songs are quite snappy too, we wanted some moments of space. For all of us coming from different musical backgrounds, a lot of the music that I listened to is actually classical music, or post rock music, which is very instrumental. It was wanting to let the music speak a little more too, so much can be said without words and sometimes I feel like words can get in the way. We wanted some moments for a listener to be able to find their own words from the music, instead of just being like ‘this is what this is about’. Just giving some space for somebody else's subconscious or imagination.
Let's talk about recent single ‘Bend’ because I just love it. We've heard this notion before about bending and breaking, but it's never really hit home until you wrote it in this song. ‘Maybe you've got to break me and see what I'm made of’. It's so beautiful. Can you talk to me a bit about this track?
We were almost not going to put it on the album because it's quite a vulnerable song for me. I'm comfortable with putting out emotion if it's done in a clever way, or if the lyrics or story or interesting. I can kind of not make it about just my raw, unfiltered emotion, and I feel like this song is just my raw, unfiltered emotion, which is a new thing for me. I find that hard to just sit in that space. To actually just be like, ‘this is me and I am not okay in a lot of ways’. I wrote it literally all in one go. I was on set, I was filming this movie, and I was staying in this hotel by myself for about a month, I was away from my son and then straight after the movie, we were flying to England to make the record. I was just feeling so overwhelmed by all of the things and feeling like I couldn't really hold it all. I've got three brothers, my family is really strong alpha male-y and I've always felt like strength is not ever letting that pain touch you, a sign of strength is just to plough through and don't even let yourself be hurt by whatever is going on. It was almost a revelation for myself of saying that actually, it's more brave and strong in a lot of ways to actually let it kind of crush you. Only then can you build up and come back from that, and ‘Bend’ just came out of that. It was originally an acoustic guitar song, and then when I brought it to Tim he really elevated it with this big chorus and these big drums. [But] when we recorded in England, I didn’t know if this was us, or if it would fit on this record, it feels like it is a bit too much. And maybe it is a bit much, and that's the risk you take, but when I started playing it acoustically in publishing showcases, or little shows we were doing the song was resonating with a lot of people in a way that I feel was quite immediate. We had a lot of feedback coming from people that the song really spoke to them. So my feeling after that was maybe it's not for everyone, but for the people that do connect with it, there is something there that seems to be resonating, so it kind of pushed me to put it on the record.
Absolutely. And it's the songs that are too much are the ones that stay with us for our whole lives. You mentioned growing up in a house with your brothers, and also that that culture here in Australia of push it down, push it down, we really struggle to say ‘you know what, maybe I’m not okay’.
Yes. Sometimes we can see images of being ‘I'm not okay’ and it's just chaos but it can also be I'm really struggling but this I still have capacity, and I still can show up and do what I need to do even though I'm struggling. It's not just this complete collapse and giving up, it's actually being honest and real and finding actually there is strength in that place. It's easy have this fear that if you actually admit to that, or actually let that thing touch me, it's going to swallow me up. But I think that experience of letting it touch you and crush you a little bit, means you can then see the resilience of the human spirit, that you can rebuild and grow. You're not taken out by it.
Was there anything that you that you outwardly did to try and encourage those nuggets of gold when everything felt overwhelming? Those moments of humanity when you think that you just want a new ice age, and then you see someone kissing a kitten on their head. Was there anything you actually sought?
So much of it was just my son. I wasn't actively seeking it in that I was like ‘I need to find examples of connection and love’, it’s thrust upon you. It's almost twofold in that it's almost part of the reason why I felt like I was gonna break, becoming a mother and that being a really wild experience, but then it's also the very thing that builds you back up again. It's just very overwhelming, having this fragile little life, and you're totally responsible for it. He was born in covid, he was very sick for the first year of his life, in and out of hospitals. It all felt very fragile. In some ways it's almost a bit heavy handed in saying, but it’s like every morning, you wake up, and you still got to look after your son, that's your job. And you can do that. There's something so instinctive and human of just waking up doing that every day, this is calling me to life, this is calling me to love and that act of loving something outside of yourself. It's been this beautiful gift because in every moment it just calls you to love and calls you to be brave because this life is depending on it.
‘Calls you to love’ that's such a beautiful way to put it. I imagine that's where that hope and that joy is amongst all the chaos. If I can be called like this, if I can see it, then I'm just a person like everyone else. Everyone else has got their own little call to love, so we're going to be okay.
Yes, that’s so true. And that's such a good of way of framing it, because you know how dysfunctional and broken you are, and you're like, if I can do this, we all can. And that's beautiful. I think a lot of our music is about that, it's acknowledging so much of our brokenness and dysfunction, but actually within all of that, we still have a choice and the ability to make little moments of good.
Finally, I just want to talk to you very briefly about the final track on the album ‘All In My Head’ on which you team up with Dave Le'aupepe from Gang of Youths. Let's talk about that little collaboration because speaking of big sound, here's a man that does also some big sounds. How did this track come together?
This song is funny, it’s actually the oldest song, I wrote that song many years ago. The way that we arranged it as a band originally was just a indie guitar song, and none of us really felt like that was what it was supposed to be, so it didn't make it on the last record. Since then it's kind of been floating out there, and then I reimagined it as a piano song. It was Tim's idea to see if Dave would sing on it, he was the first person that came to his mind. Tim and Dave have been friends for a long time, and Tim first showed Dave some of our first demos before we'd done anything. Dave really helped us and encouraged us to get started and we've been on this beautiful journey with Gang of Youths since then. We love them, but we also love their music and artistry. It’s funny, when Tim first said it I was like, this is not really a duet song, this is very personal, this is my song. It's also an isolated song, ‘is this all in my head?’ I would love Dave to be on any song, but I really wrestled with it for that particular song because I just wasn't sure. But as I thought about it more and more, I loved the idea of sharing that with someone, almost as an image of the fact that so many of us feel a lot of the time that idea of ‘am I crazy? What's going on?’ People are feeling that simultaneously, particularly in a relationship, you can have two people who are on the inside going ‘is it all in my head?’ It almost gave this new life and a new depth into the meaning of the song. Because Dave lives in London now we didn't even get together in the studio and so he ended up recording vocals in his studio in London. It just came together so naturally and beautifully that we all felt it was such a beautiful way to end the record. It was one of those little almost miracle songs where it's been floating around, we didn't have a clear vision for it, but as we chipped away, it found its way.
Faith Crisis Pt 1 is out now via EMI Records. You can buy and stream here.
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Faith Crisis Pt 1 Australia tour dates
10 May – Forum, Melbourne,
11 May - Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
23 May - Astor Theatre, Perth
25 May - The Gov, Adelaide
30 May - Odeon Theatre, Hobart
1 Jun - The Tivoli, Brisbane
7 Jun - Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Tickets available here from 16 February 10am (local time)
