INTERVIEW: Hatchie releases second album 'Giving The World Away': "I wanted it to be really balanced and expand upon my previous sound and dig a lot deeper"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Lissyelle
Australia’s Harriette Pilbeam has been releasing music as Hatchie since 2017, but it only now, with the release of her second album Giving The World Away, that she feels she has really arrived as the artist she was always meant to be.
Making her name with gorgeous dream pop and shoegaze, which was basically a masterclass in how to make music in those genres, for Giving The World Away she has maintained that style as a foundation but has ramped up the beat and the volume, inflecting her music with a fuller pop sound as well as touches of electronica.
“I'm capable of writing more than just nice dream pop songs, and there's more to me than just writing songs about being in love or being heartbroken - there's a bigger picture than that,” Pilbeam says. “This album really just feels like the beginning to me, and scratching the surface – and even though it’s my third release as Hatchie, I feel like I’m rebooting from scratch.”
Produced by Jorge Elbrecht (Sky Ferreira, Japanese Breakfast) and featuring collaborations with Joe Agius and Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo), the album explores her personal journey through broken relationships and the self-doubt and anxiety she experienced as her music career exploded internationally. Ultimately it is an album of regaining everything you thought you lost, and discovering an empowering new self-confidence in the process: “It’s all I know, and I’m taking it back,” she sings on the track ‘Quicksand’.
Single ‘Lights On’ is probably the most indicative of the new direction Pilbeam wanted her music to go. A classic indie track, it transforms in the chorus to a shimmering pop track with some gorgeous melodies that compels you to move. ‘The Rhythm’ is a buzzy. electronic, techno and house melting pot which is possibly the most experimental track Pilbeam has done, while both title track ‘Giving The World Away’ and ‘Don’t Leave Me In The Rain’ are shot through with electronica beats and sonics. The album ends with ‘Sunday Song’ and ‘Til We Run Out Of Air’, two dreamy, lush ballads.
After releasing her debut EP Sugar & Spice in 2018 and debut album Keepsake in 2019, Pilbeam has attracted international praise and Giving The World Away is quite possibly her greatest work to date, proving she is a remarkable artist who has so much more to give in the years to come. We recently sat down with her to find out more about the creation of the album.
Hello Hatchie, so lovely to chat with you. You have a superb sophomore album Giving The World Away out today. How are you feeling with this dazzling dream pop of an album out in the world?
I'm feeling good. We just shot the last video for the new single ‘The Rhythm’, which is also out today. it is very exciting, because it's been a really long lead up, but it really also feels like a quick rush of videos in the last six months. So it's nice to be able to relax and know that it's coming out now and there's not much I can do except wait and just relax, hopefully. I'm very excited for it to be out though.
So am I, and your video go hand in hand with your music because I feel like your music is incredibly cinematic. Do you always see a song when you record it? Or do you see it as a completely different entity when you make the video?
I'm really lucky that I do this whole project with my husband, Joe, and he does take care of a lot of the visual stuff. He directs most of my videos, and he edits most of them as well. So we really get to talk about it from the get go together because we create the song together and then we create videos together. It's nice being such a big part of it and having so much control over everything rather than handing it over to someone who I've never met before who just directs videos. That's definitely a key element of it. We're often talking about the videos from the moment we start working on a song together. Particularly with this album, we really wanted it to be all about the live show and the videos even more than ever before. ‘The Rhythm’ is really 100% just a live show being recorded, this one in particular more than the others is really all about that cohesion of the live show with the visual with the audio all together.
I love that, keep going down that rabbit hole with art and life and imitation.
Yeah, I think growing up, waking up on the weekends and watching Rage on ABC and watching music videos so much plays into a lot of because we didn't grow up in a time before music videos, for us music videos were always a part of the music, they go hand in hand to us.
Absolutely. Do you think there's been a resurrection in that? Saturday and Sunday mornings used to camped out in front of the television just waiting for your track. It kind of disappeared for a little while, but I feel like artists are now going ‘no, this was the thing I grew up with’. So perhaps it's a generational thing.
Yeah, we were talking about it last night and I actually think it's one thing that's really come out of social media, is the resurgence of videos because everything has gone back to being so visual again. That's partly because of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. I cannot imagine releasing a song now without a video, it seems really odd to me to have a song out with no visual aspect to it. It’s one of the positive things of everyone being so tuned into their phones and their computers now is it's really brought the video back.
And we get to share it immediately, which is an amazing thing to be able to do. I want to talk to you about the album opener ‘Lights On’ because I feel that this track just sets the tone for the whole album, melodically and musically and even thematically. Can you talk to me about this track, because as soon as it starts, I'm smiling.
Thank you! It’s probably my favourite song on the record. We wrote that one in February 2020 and I knew that I wanted it to be either the lead single, or the opening track for the record, something that really set the tone. Because it really wakes you up as soon as you start hearing it, and it really encapsulates everything that I wanted to explore with this record. It kind of set us off for writing all the other songs on the record to really match that energy, which was really exciting. It's been really fun to play live and I feel like it had this immediate connection with the crowd as soon as we started playing it, even though it wasn't out as a single yet. It's just a really exciting vibrant song.
Giving The World Away is such a glorious title. Can you talk to me about your desires going in? Creating an album isn't just like, ‘oh, I have 12 songs now’. You've got hundreds of songs, so there's a definite ‘choose my favourite kid’ going on here and finding a theme. Can you walk me through how you pulled that one together?
Yeah, it can be quite hard. The main difference with this record and my previous record was the last record was kind of whatever songs I'd been writing at that time. I was like, ‘cool, I'll put this on the album’. It was very casual. I thought it through, but nowhere near as thoroughly as I thought through this one. With this one, it was a much more careful placement, and a much more thorough decision making process. I really looked at the album and how it was balancing and figured out where to place each track and whether I needed to write more tracks to fill in any gaps that were on the record. I wanted it to be really nicely balanced and expand upon my previous sound and really dig a lot deeper on what I had done with Keepsake, and I think I did do what I set out to do. One positive outcome of us being locked down at home for so long is that we could spend a lot more time on it so [husband] Joe and I really spent almost every day during lockdown in 2020 working on this. I went a lot deeper on the lyrics and put a lot more thought into them and I'm even more happy with it than I was with the previous albums. I’m very proud of it.
Your debut Keepsake was something else and I remember reading a review about it and it hit the nail on the head saying it was an album that just belongs part and parcel with a film. There's a track on Giving The World Away ‘Thinking Of’ that's got that similar ‘roll credits’ vibe to it. Can you talk me through that song?That one is pretty much exactly the same as the original demo we recorded except we added in a bunch of percussion and some extra guitars and keys. When I thought about fleshing it out into a fuller track, I thought that it would be taking away the magic of the original, the simplicity of it was what made it so beautiful. I really wanted to keep it as simple as it was, but just warm it up a little bit and fill out some of the gaps. I think you're right. it really fills in that role that a lot of my older songs filled in as well and it kind of harks back to that earlier sound of Keepsake and my first EP [Sugar & Spice].
It's gorgeous. You've got this real breadth to your music, and this openness that doesn't seem forced at all. Who were those artists that you looked up to and set the bar for the kind of artist you are today? Who did you look up to musically growing up?
Growing up, I was really into The Corrs and Kylie Minogue and I think you can hear that in my music, little bits here and there, even if they aren't really obvious. More recently, as an adult, I listened to a lot of shoegaze and dream pop music like Cocteau Twins, and The Sundays, and My Bloody Valentine. And also darker things like Curve and Nine Inch Nails. Everything But The Girl is another big one as well. What is really integral to my music is having a really broad range of influences. Yes, you can pick out the influences, but I don't know that there are many other people with the exact same mix of influences that I have, which maybe is what people get excited by. It's not that it sounds like anything extremely revolutionary, but it's just the blend of it that's really interesting. You can really hear the pop influences and the more alternative influences together.
Absolutely, I can hear all of those things. Your single from earlier this year ‘Quicksand’ is such a great track. It had a pretty solid collaboration behind it, can you talk me through this track?
This one had probably the longest process out of all of the songs. It started off as a demo that I made in late 2019 that was really simple and really bright and poppy with really sharp edges. I didn't really know what direction to take it in because I wanted it to become more interesting. Joe and I worked on it together at home, and turned it into a more fleshed out version with a more solid structure and with most of the lyrics that you hear in the final product today. And then when we were going to LA on a writing trip in February 2020, Dan Nigro was at the top of my list of people who I wanted to collaborate with in some way or another, because he'd worked with a lot of artists that I really admired. I love what he'd done in the past, and at that point he hadn’t done any of the Olivia Rodrigo stuff. We went in with him and thought that would be the perfect song for him to help us out with. We finished that off with him, worked on some lyrics and solidified the structure and the production together but it still had a bit more of a process to go through. I was going to release it as a standalone single, but it didn't feel quite right to be the only single that I put out that year. I felt like it makes more sense with the album as a whole and not by itself as a Hatchie single. We held off and did a bit more work on it with the album's producer, Jorge Elbrecht, which got it to where it is today and filled it out a bit more to be the more darker sounding song that you know it as. It was definitely a really long process and something that I um-ed and ah-ed about a lot over months, because it just wasn't quite hitting the mark that I wanted it to hit at first, but we got there in the end.
Do you love having those elements though, to your music? The fact that you could, I imagine, when you play live and just really mix it up. This is my darker version, this is my full acoustic version. You can pull it apart. I guess that also comes from your confidence in yourself as an artist and musician, what you're capable of and what you know your music can do.
Totally. Part of being an artist these days is doing different versions of songs, it seems to be a really big element. Whether it's because you're on a more stripped back tour, you're playing a showcase like South by Southwest, or you're doing an online live stream, there's lots of different reasons to do different versions of songs these days, which is really exciting. I shy away from doing more stripped back acoustic versions of songs, because I think that it doesn't really suit my music, particularly my newer songs, I think you really need to hear all of the parts with all my newest stuff to really understand it. We've also been looking at doing remixed versions of songs, whether it's for exclusive releases or for shows, I really want to work on doing darker versions of songs in the future. That can make songs a lot more interesting, hearing all the different versions of them and it just changes songs so much. Taking out one little element can completely change it. That's what's so interesting, but also scary, about music is that I can listen to an old demo and be like, ‘Wow, this song started out so differently from how it is now imagine if I hadn't made that one little change or showed it to that particular person who turned it into this whole new version’. It's really exciting but also a bit scary how much of a difference that can make. It's sliding doors moments when you listen to old demos and think about what a song could have been.
You have done some incredible things and rubbed some pretty fine shoulders on tour. including your girlhood idol Kylie Minogue which is just kick arse. It is an incredible feat for a seemingly small amount of time to be releasing music and I'd wanted to know were there any particular windows or glass ceilings you really had to slam your way through in order to get where you are today, and where you're still headed?
I'm really lucky in that I haven't really felt any super strong sexism in my career. I know that it's definitely still there, but I think being an able bodied neurotypical, white cis straight person means that I'm not really a minority in any other fields. I haven't had to really face any huge challenges because of that. But there are still lots of little things, I do often have to repeat myself a few times in male spaces when it comes to having my opinion heard. I do find it really hard to find women to work with, even trying to find females to play in my band has been difficult to find surprisingly. Having to break through the glass ceiling is not as obvious to me as those other little things.
You're right. there's that broader question there too - why am I struggling to find people? I often hear it with artists asking, ‘where are the producers, I want to work with a female producer’. Because there's a certain kind of energy that's bought to the room and unfortunately, there's also a safety issue and when you feel completely safe, then you can be your best self and do your best work. But quite often, it's just really hard to come by, particularly in Australia.
Yeah, it's interesting. I've done a few writing sessions with female artists in Australia, but whenever I've been paired up for writing sessions in the US, they're all with male producers. There definitely are female producers out there, and there definitely are female writers out there but there are nowhere near as many as males.
Lastly before I have to leave you, we have this glorious album out now. Tell me what else you've got coming up?
Hopefully just a whole heap of touring to make up for lost time. The first two or three years of Hatchie we were touring non stop, and we got really used to it. And then not having done it for two years just feels really weird. I don't want to take a break again for a while in case it slips through my fingers again. So a whole lot of touring!
Giving The World Away Album Tour
26 Aug - Jive, Adelaide, SA
27 Aug – Magnet House, Perth, WA
02 Sep – Factory Theatre, Sydney, NSW
03 Sep – The Triffid, Brisbane, QLD
09 Sep – Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
Tickets Available here.
Giving The World Away is out now via Ivy league Records. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Hatchie you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
