INTERVIEW: Montaigne releases third album 'making it!': "I ended up writing heaps of songs about my partner because I was in love and I felt I had something novel to say."

Interview: Jett Tattersall

Australian artist Montaigne first released music in 2014, and over the past eight years has developed into one of the country’s most creative and unique artists. Creating distinctive pop music that plays with structure and challenges the normal concept of what a pop song is, from indie pop to electronic-synth pop, their music can encompass unbridled joy through to introspective heartbreak.

Today they releases their third studio album making it! featuring ten tracks. It is an album that explores relationships, death, the universe and the anxieties of modern life. Sonically, while it is still uniquely Montaigne, the first thing that strikes you is the all embracing of shiny, electronic-based music. “This record is a departure from my previous ones because there are almost no acoustic/real/unprocessed sounds on it,” Montaigne says. “We were aspiring to a computer record, but we wanted it to still feel warm in places, and I think for all its digital nature it's still innately human.”

The album pulls no punches from the very beginning, with a quartet of tracks that really push the sonic envelope. Opener ‘in the green room’ is a distorted, experimental track, while ‘embodi3d’ has a similar vibe before it breaks out into frantic dancefloor techno beats towards the end. ‘die4u’ and ‘jc ultra’ lean into hyper pop, with the latter taking a wry look at both office life and the music industry. ‘The world is going to love you…the world it needs your music,’ Montaigne sings.

‘now (in space)’ is an album standout and is probably the most ‘traditional’ pop song on the album. A persistent beat, swirling synths and a soaring chorus, backed with lyrics about yearning for someone you love when they are not around, singing: ‘I wake up in the morning yearning for your love.’

The final four tracks showcase a number of big name collaborations Montaigne has brought on board for making it! ‘make me feel so…’ features Icelandic singer Daði Freyr and explores Montaigne’s current relationship and the security and contentment a healthy relationship brings. “You make me feel so normal / I’m a freak but I feel normal…you make me feel so at home”. It is set against a soundscape that is reminiscent of the pop songs you know but takes so many unexpected delicious twists and turns that it reinvigorates the format.

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne features on two tracks, firstly on the album’s second single ‘always be you’. A glitchy pop track about the euphoria of falling in love it is a uplifting delight that quickly becomes a ear worm. Byrne also features on ‘gravity’, which is one of the album’s greatest tracks. A magical ballad, with lullaby type chimes and a outstanding vocal performance by Montaigne with angelic backing vocals. It is a hypnotic listen.

The album closes with the Maika Loubte collab ‘comet death’, a moody and melancholic track that sees Montaigne ruminating on the consequences to them and their loved ones if a comet hits the earth. It is a beautiful and introspective way to end the album.

Montaigne has created an exceptional album that is both left of field and traditional, challenging and comforting, insightful and whimsical. It furthers their reputation as a creative visionary who is never afraid to dive deep into the unconventional, creating gold in the process. We recently caught up with Montaigne to chat more about the creation of the album, their musical journey and their upcoming live shows.

Hi, Jess. So lovely to steal a wedge of your time today. You have an absolutely divine album making it! - and make it you did! It’s so good. Where were you at going into this creature, and where are you at now that it's a complete being?
Me and Dave Thomas started writing together in mid 2020. I heard ‘Don't Need You’ by Genesis Owusu And I was like, this is an excellent song, who worked on that song, I want to work with him. My manager messaged him [Dave Hammer], he was keen and fortunately he was working out of the studio across the road from where I was living at the time. We got along really well. I really liked the song we did, and we just kept making music together. Eventually it was like, ‘okay, is this a thing? Are we doing an album?!’ We ended up with like, 20. I really love working with Dave, it was a joy and a delight and we were both listening to similar types of music like Charli XCX and Sophie.

Content wise, at that point I was a year into my relationship with my partner. We’d known each other for four years before we got together, we've been friends for a long time and by that year mark, our relationship had settled into a really lovely certain place. Which wasn't necessarily the case for the eight months prior! We had a lot of hurdles to jump, a lot of challenges to try and get through together and a lot of sort of insecurities to manoeuvre. At that year mark I was reflecting on that. and I was at that point, where I was like, ‘I'm fairly certain I'm going to be with this person for the rest of my life and I think he feels the same way’. When I first started working with Dave I was like, ‘I'm gonna write character stories, I don't want to write music about myself anymore’. I did write a few songs that weren’t necessarily about me and have some weird narrative to them, but I eventually ended up writing heaps of songs about my partner because I was in love and I felt like I had something novel to say.

I love that. On ‘make me feel so…’ you really pull it apart and it’s this absolute joyous celebration of ‘you make me feel so normal’. We're not flying through the clouds, there's no unicorns,, I just feel really standard here and it's a great place to be.
Yes! We almost have this reverse timeline, a lot of people say the honeymoon period is the first six months of your relationship, but me and Pat’s honeymoon period has been ever since the one year mark. Before it was a real struggle, are we gonna stay together, is this actually working. After we crested that hill, it's just been amazing and perfect and divine ever since. We're still really in love with each other, but it's not passionate, fiery, intense love, it's just two people who deeply respect and care for each other and have lots of fun together and know how to resolve conflict in a healthy way and so feel good about each other all the time.

There's not enough songs written about sensible mature relationships!
100%. You don’t get many fun pop songs about that, and I wanted to do something like that. Because I am having fun, this is the kind of music I'm interested in and this is the truth of what I'm experiencing. I'd love to represent that for people so they don't just think it has to be one way or no way.

The album itself itself is very you, you are exploring and playing with so many facets of sound, both vocally and with production and also with the visuals. I was reading a post on Instagram talking about the anxiety you feel around not just making a song, but also the responsibility that comes with creating the visuals and how you felt about giving that responsibility to other people. Can you talk me through that?
Yeah, I've inherited my dad's control freak nature! I used to want to micromanage everything. I do have a creative or visual aesthetic vision, but I don't know how to realise it. I don't have the skill for it, or the vocabulary, and it didn't know how to explain it to other creatives or even identify what I want in other creatives. I've struggled with that throughout my career. There are a handful of things I have been happy with and a bunch of other things that were like ‘that’s not exactly what I wanted, but I've paid for it now and deadlines are arriving, I just have to accept it.’ So with making it! I wanted to let go of the reins and find people that I trusted and be like, ‘here's some references, now just interpret that and have a play with that as you will, I'm just gonna sit back and relax.’ My thing is music, I think I'm very good at that, but with the visual stuff, it gives me deep anxiety. And it worked really well. The people that I ended up collaborating with did interpret the colour and the music and my references really effectively. That's part of why I called the album making it! as well because it was about me learning about my creative process and my needs. Surpassing the age of 25 and learning more about myself and being a bit more mature about delegating and all of that. Not being as hands on as I have been just because it has been such a profound waste of energy!

It's so good to hear, and it's so refreshing because listeners probably look at popsters as being hands on with everything, but each song is your child. And you know what they say about raising a child, it takes a village. It probably takes a couple of villages to release a song, let alone an album.
Yeah. There are some legendary artists throughout time like David Bowie, David Byrne, Prince and Björk who clearly have this exceptional vision for their music, and it feels like they've been the directors throughout that incredible career. [But] back then they didn't really have to deal with like social media and all of the other things we have to deal with. Also they did have teams of people helping them. I'm not a massive artist, and I don't have a lot of money, I have enough to be doing this full time, but I'm not like rolling in. I don't have huge budgets for my artist project and that hugely limits what I can actually achieve visually and aesthetically. Artists who are on huge major labels with huge budgets have teams and teams of people working on their stuff. l I forget that the pressure [I feel] is kind of irrelevant, because that pressure is related to something I can't possibly meet because I just don't have the resources. I just get stressed because the conditions of my life and my career do not meet the expectations of social media and the rest of it. That's not what I signed up for 10 years ago when I started a music career. I just wanted to make music and hopefully be successful doing it and perform live. But now, even to get people to come to your show, you need to capture their attention, and the only way to get their attention is to perform in alliance with the algorithm, and the stuff that the algorithm wants I don't want to do, so what now?!

You have to do a degree in social media and IT in order to become a popstar!
You could do the degree and still not be aligned with the procedure, right? My partner works in communications and social media, that's his specialty. He’ll always be like, ‘you should post this, you should do this, you should think about this’. I'm like, I don't want to. I'm aware of what I need to do, I just don't really want to do it! It feels dumb and bad, and it feels like I'm exploiting myself.

Social media is a double edged sword. Years ago, artists didn't have a voice, they didn't have a place to reply to comments, they didn't have a place apart from their music, they just had assumptions placed on them. But it also meant they could carry on with their lives. The world looks to artists for political answers, they look to them for hope. How do you find managing that expectation of fans looking to you for opinions on things, so they can better form their own?
This is the thing. When I was in my early 20s, I really bought into the idea of as an artist posting on social media, I can change the world. But I do not believe that anymore, and I don't think it realistically does anything. You can possibly bring awareness to something that a fan might not have been aware of, and they might become interested and explore that further. But the people that actually have any meaningful impact on the way systems in the world work are activists and union organisers and all those people that are actually doing the work to fundamentally change things. Me being on social media saying ‘I think you should vote’ - maybe I get some people to vote but then who are they voting for? At the end of the day, it's activists who are out in the streets or who are campaigning or talking to politicians, trying to organise workers so that they can get better wages, get greater rights. They are actually changing the world because they are doing the groundwork and organising communities for people to band together in solidarity. As an artist, I don't think I do much. The most meaningful impact I have is songs about my human experience, which hopefully you will see yourself in and be able to feel more normal about yourself and have an emotionally resonant experience that feels worthwhile and keeps you on the earth, and hopefully encourages you to exercise some empathy towards yourself and towards other people. My job as an artist is largely emotional and psychological rather than political. I obviously have political views, and I express them online, but I don't know what that does, other than to draw other people who also share my political view to me. I don't think I'm changing minds out here.

But also you are changing people all the time because in all your unicorn mane, technicolour alt pop beauty, what you do in amongst all that rainbow is normalise the insecurity of people feeling like the outlier, you make the outlier a beautiful thing that gets a cup of tea and watches The Golden Girls in the afternoon. That's what you do with your music and that's what changes people's perspective on a grander scale. You are embarking on a national tour, which is exciting. Tell me a little bit about that.
Yeah, it’s going to be my first one in ages, since before the pandemic, which feels weird because usually I do at least one a year. It's small venues, I chose that on purpose because I really prefer a more intimate space when I'm performing. I know my music can be quite large, but I really dislike it when I can't look everyone in the crowd in the eyes. When I'm in a room, I feel closer to them and that’s important for my music because of that emotional resonance we're talking about, I really need to feel connected. We had all these plans and ideas, I don't know how many of them are going to get realised because I'll have like two weeks to rehearse! But either way, it's going to be a pretty wonderful show. The intimacy is going to make up for the lack of spectacle. Not to say there won’t be spectacle, I mean I'll still be up on stage and I know how to bring spectacle!

making it! is out now via Wonderlick Records/Sony Music. You can buy and stream here.

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

THE ‘making it!’ TOUR: for tickets and info click here

30 September - Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide
01 October - Rosemount, Perth
06 October - The Northern, Byron Bay
07 October - Solbar, Maroochydore
08 October -  The Zoo, Brisbane
14 October - Oxford Arts Factory, Sydney
15 October- Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle
20 October - Corner Hotel, Melbourne
21 October - Barwon, Geelong
22 October - Volta, Ballarat
28 October - La La Las, Wollongong