INTERVIEW: Kinder launch new era with single 'Come Along': "We're not afraid to do something that might sound a bit whack or a bit weird...just as long as it's fresh."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Australian sisters Briony and Savannah Osei, better now as pop duo Kinder, hail from the country NSW town of Maitland and have been immersed in music from a young age. First making their career as DJs when they were teenagers, their slots performing at regional NSW, and later Sydney, nightclubs soon turned into headline performances, festival appearances and support slots for international artists such as Marshmello and RL Grime. They released their first single ‘What You’re Like’ in 2018 and have since released a number of singles that are as addictive as they are unique, mixing electronica and pop with the sounds of their ancestral home Ghana.

Kinder recently signed a major record deal with Warner Music and today they launch this new era in their career with the single ‘Come Along’. Featuring the traditional Ghanaian instrument the Gyill, the song is a hypnotic, club track with primal beats connecting right into your soul while also remaining warm and accessible. There is something so refreshingly alive and invigorating about ‘Come Along’ and Kinder’s music in general that it is not a stretch to mark them out as one of Australia’s major music stars of the future. This is a duo we should all be watching closely and we can’t wait to hear what they come up with next. To celebrate the release of ‘Come Along’, we recently caught up with Briony and Savannah to find out more.

Briony and Savannah, hello! How are things with you two?
Briony: Things are good actually. We’re really excited about this new music coming out. It’s given us a lot of motivation after a pretty quiet year.

Before I dive into the new single, I want to say what a breath of fresh air you are. You two create the best tunes to dance to hands down.
Savannah: That’s so nice.
Briony: That’s really lovely to hear.

‘Come Along’, what an ass kicking lead single. You have peppered the hell out of the dance floor on that track and your vocals just soar. It absolutely soars. And I just want to know, before I pull it apart, where did this song come from?
Savannah: It started with the two of us messing around with some ideas, because we had a writing camp run by KLP. It started off with Briony, she was remembering a time when we were younger and went to Ghana for a trip and just the memories there. It started off as a little story and we always like to prepare for these writing trips. We’re a bit different to other people that will just go in and wing it. So, we had this little verse ready to go.
Briony: We were put in a room with a girl called Mookie and A Girl and then when we got talking to A Girl and she was saying how, in New Zealand where she's from, there's such a sense of community and family and we were like, ‘Oh, that's like us with Ghana’.
Savannah: They just had similar traditions and customs that we had experienced. So, we wrote about that together with A Girl and it was really nice.

You’re multifaceted engineers of music, the two of you. Singer songwriter producers…Being kids in the candy shop of musical possibilities here, you've clearly gone for absolute gold with this track both lyrically, production wise and sound. Did you both just go, ‘Okay, let's just stick it all in there’. You know what I mean? How did you go about creating that soundscape?
Savannah: Yes, it was a journey.
Briony: It was a journey. it's taken us a year to get there with this track honestly. That's exactly right, there were so many things that we wanted to do with it, so many inspirations and sounds that we really wanted and so it took working with six different people on this track…
Savannah: …to get what we really wanted, you know, the Ghanaian elements, the chants, the poppy vocals, but then also that heavy drop.
Briony: Yeah, we just wanted it all.
Savannah: It started off a bit chiller. And everyone was like, ‘happy with that’. And we did love that version, but we were like ‘there needs to be more’.
Briony: We just wanted it to really fit into our world. We just took a whole year to get there.

You two clearly have such joy and such support from each other. I guess the fact that you’re sisters and you’re best mates resonates through your music with such integrity. Do you think maybe that's something that's possibly been missing from the dance music that you were listening to, that unbridled joy?
Briony: Hmm. I guess it's hard to find a balance. What has been the challenge is finding that balance between the joy and that late night something that you can dance to. Something you can get a bit crazy to. Maybe we've done it without realising that that connection and that joy that we try and bring in everyday life has trickled into it. But it's not something that we did deliberately.
Savannah: I guess we always are so joyful and festive at our shows. They’re upbeat. So we didn't want it to just be too late night. We wanted those happy high energy elements in it as well.
Briony: Yeah, definitely. Anyone that's been to our show knows that it's quite silly and it's quite playful. I mean, the name Kinder, it all has this kind of childlike theme going. That's just now where we've landed.

You're just creating the music that really is you, which is amazing, because it just means you're doing it with so much integrity and this is why the listeners come. I want to go a little bit to your backstory. You were raised in Maitland which I’m pretty sure doesn’t have a huge club scene. How did you get from sort of household singing and producing and writing together to unleashing your wonderful sounds onto the Sydney scene?
Briony: To backtrack, we actually started in Bathurst.
Savannah: Where you went to uni. And then you started DJing just for fun, and for a little bit of extra money at first, and then you came back and were like, ‘we should do this together’ and I was like, ‘nah… I don't want to play other people's music’. I always just wanted to do our own music. And then she’s like ‘no, let's just give it a go’. So then I tried it and I was like… this is so fun. So then we started doing clubs in Bathurst and then I would do little shows in Newcastle. And then we decided to move to Sydney.
Briony: Then we both moved to Sydney together and we were like… well, you know, because we're having so much fun in the regional communities we were like ‘let's just try’. We met one guy who worked for a music magazine and he knew some people. He got us our first gig there. So, we were like, let's just keep rolling with this and see who we can meet and see what we can do and that's how it started really.

Your music is so layered, which is incredibly important and why it took a year because you're just putting little bottle taps in there and sounds. I just wanted to know, how important is it for the pair of you to push through those boundaries or expectations of genres when it comes to your music?
Briony: That's been a big thing for us.
Savannah: Yeah, it really has, because at first we were so influenced by other people's opinions, and them saying you had to kind of stick to the one genre.
Briony: It's something that I guess now, after doing it for a few years, we just realised that you don't have to stick to the one thing.
Savannah: You can do what you want.
Briony: It's funny, because the name Kinder comes from that idea of not sticking to one genre. Because when we were younger, we had this idea that we would just change and do whatever we wanted.
Savannah: Hip hop. House music. Our sets were wild all over the place.
Briony: Yeah. And we thought it could be a surprise for people. So, it does come from the chocolate. It's a big thing for us to just now be… who cares what it is.
Savannah: You can just do what you love.

I love this. So depending on your mood, you could come out and sing a ballad one day and then heavy house the next.
Briony: We have ballads and we will put them out.

Just listen up people! Looking back to your own youth and growing up and really experimenting initially with music and the heroines you were listening to, do you both feel like you're making the music that you needed to dance to when you were young?
Briony: Possibly. I guess we always try to do something a bit different and a bit unique and we're always exploring that idea of not being afraid to do something that might sound a bit whack or a bit weird to some people. Just as long as it's fresh. So maybe that is what we were searching for. Just something a little different.

Pre global collapse on a multitude of scales, your shows are notoriously high energy and full of joy and surprises and we now have dance music with not many spaces in dance in aside from kitchens. How do you feel about releasing these tracks with not these big festivals you'd be able to play at the moment?
Savannah: For a while, we were a bit hesitant putting it out there because of that reason.
Briony: Yeah, we were like ‘we're not putting it out for so long’ actually. Some people on our team were like, ‘no life goes on, you need to put it out’ and we were like ‘no, let’s just wait’. We're really lucky here in Australia that things are starting to get better a bit. But also, it is that thing - they were right, life does go on. People are still going to find ways to dance. You still need to have that outlet. Music is so important.
Savannah: Yeah, it was the right time.
Briony: We just need to do it. The music's ready. And so even if you know, the world's not completely opened up, we want to get it out there.

And bedroom dance floors are equally as fun with a more comfortable shoe.
Briony: That’s true!

I imagine watching a crowd move and chant along to your music must be both euphoric and also quite a learning tool or an inspiration station. I'm assuming you're still writing now and I'm just wondering how the past 12 months and all its chaos has affected your music and your inspiration?
Briony: I guess we've had more time to explore more.
Savannah: Yeah. There’s no pressure to get it out.
Briony: It's nice when we have days where we are just write what we're feeling. It doesn't have to be for anything in particular. We've just had so much time. So that's been really nice, to just go free. Be wild.

Beautiful. And lastly, before I leave you, what is on the horizon for Kinder?
Savannah: Wow. Well, we've had a lot of time to write a lot of music. Possibly an EP?
Briony: Yeah. We're gonna put out all the tracks we've made in an EP.

‘Come Along’ is out now via Warner Music. You can download on iTunes and stream on Apple Music and Spotify.

To keep up with all things Kinder you can follow them on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.