INTERVIEW: Becca Hatch releases her debut EP 'Mayday': "I’ve realised that if I don't trust myself, I'm never going to be happy in this industry"

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 9 August 2024

Australia’s Becca Hatch has been creating waves in the music scene since she was just 16 when she won Triple J’s Unearthed High Indigenous Initiative in 2017. Initially becoming one of the leaders of the small but burgeoning Australia R&B scene, over the past few years she has evolved her sound introducing more electronic pop elements to her music.

Today she releases her debut EP Mayday. Across its 8 tracks, Hatch explores resilience, growth, love and finding your voice. The EP has an energetic dance pop soundscape, with elements of house, drum and bass and also bringing in hints of her R&B foundation.

The EP starts with the first single ‘Bass Keeps Calling’. It is a heady, frantic dance track that leans heavily into trance and club sounds, with recurring lyrical hooks and dreamy vocals. ‘Incapable’ continues the trancey, late night dancefloor feel with fast beats, echoing vocals and lyrics that speak of Hatch finding someone that sees her for what she is: ‘You see the best in me / See the good in me / Don’t want to mess this up’.

Second single ‘Think Of You’ is still as fresh and mesmerising as ever, starting off with a gentle, music box feel before transforming into a glitchy, hyperpop delight. ‘One Of One’ has the strongest R&B soundscape on the EP, while ‘Leave Me Low’ is a melancholic dance track with some gorgeous melodies and Hatch trying to convince a partner to not walk away.

Latest single ‘Crash’ is the sonic outlier on the EP, a lush pop ballad with a soaring chorus that sees Hatch find strength through adversity. “‘Crash’ is a song about being in the midst of what feels like a really hard time. Feeling like everything is weighing on you and it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said on the song’s release. “I wrote this song during a time I felt like that. While the sentiment of ‘Crash’ and the themes are quite sad, after some time spent healing, the song developed into a song about hope; a love letter to myself, to remind myself that I am loved and worthy.”

‘Hold Me’ is a gorgeous song and a highlight on the EP. Set to a dance beat, it plays with structure with the chorus, instead of becoming a powerful blast, is an ethereal, magical mantra with Hatch focusing on the importance of self-care as she realises love for her has to come from her first - ‘I found a different side of me / Someone to hold me close…I need to hold me close’.

The EP ends with ‘Settle Down’, which in reality will do nothing near that. Its beat slowly builds up in a delicious manner, slowly teasing your ears before it lands with a brooding, thick beat and the most mesmerisingly immersive, late night club feels you will hear in a long time.

Mayday is a debut release to get extremely excited about. Hatch brilliantly manages to bring together euphoric dance beats with meaningful, emotive stories that bring heart and soul right into the centre of the dancefloor. A fitting culmination to her years of hard work and dedication, this is clearly just the beginning of a new chapter in her already impressive career. We recently sat down with Hatch to chat all about the creation of this EP.

Hi Becca, so lovely to see you, we are massive fans at Women In Pop. Congratulations on Mayday! It's a silly question, but how are you feeling about it? Because this is huge.
I'm really excited for it. It's been in the works for like, a year or so, even longer, so it's really exciting to have it finally come out. I've been playing the songs live, and it's a whole different feeling when things actually get released, and people can hear it and understand the journey and the story. So I'm feeling good about it.

it is quite the journey, and it's all very cohesive which is gorgeous. Obviously the word ‘mayday’ is a distress call, talk to me a little bit about the collation of these tracks because you have been releasing music for a while now but this is the first collection. Did you have an intention going into it?
For the last few years, I've been releasing singles, and I think if you listen to my music over the years, you can hear it's gone through this journey of constantly changing and evolving. At the start of last year, I had a moment where I was like, ‘I think I'm ready to go in and make a body of work’. I finally felt like I was ready and had developed the sound I wanted to make, that sits within this pop, dance, R&B space, a fusion of that. I spent a month just making this, with the intention of it being an EP. I just wanted to make music that was fun and more club music, dance based.

The subjects of Mayday wasn't really something that was thought about. We only went into this with the idea of it being a dance project, but a lot of external things really influenced what the project ended up being about. So while it's dance music, it's also talking about things that are really personal to me. I didn't go in with the intention of it being some really sad journey, but that's kind of what it came out to be, a story of growth.

It's not just pure dance, you've got some quite reflective dial it back back moments. I imagine also, as a writer, you quite often don't see what you're writing about until you've kind of gone through it, you've come out the other side and you're like, ‘Oh, I was a bit sad!’
Yeah, I definitely feel like that. When we were making this project, there were a few different songs that I feel had a completely different meaning to begin with. A song like ‘Crash’ was a really sad song. I wrote it when I was going through a really hard period, and I was feeling a lot of weight on me and pressure. I really struggled to finish the verses on it, but as time went on, when I looked at it, I felt really proud, and I felt like it was more like a love letter to myself. But when I was making it, it was a whole different vibe. A lot of the songs were like that. There's another song called ‘Hold Me’, which we wrote last and I wouldn't have been able to write that song at the start of this project. But it fell into place, just with the whole journey. So it's been interesting.

Gorgeous. Your journey started in 2017 when you came through on Unearthed High. Do you think getting to this point now where you've got a lot of songs behind you, there had to be that moment of not just growth, but trust in your instincts as a creator?
I definitely feel like coming into this industry so young has taught me a lot of different things. Learning to trust myself as a creative has been one thing that I've had to get good at. Being so young, it's really easy to be pulled different ways, because everyone's trying to teach you what they think is right. In this industry, the one thing I realised is no one's right. There's no right way to do anything. I've learned that the hard way! I’ve realised that if I don't trust myself, I'm never going to be happy in this industry. It's something I'm still working on, I'm not fully confident all the time, but it's definitely something I'm working on, for sure.  

Do you think that's particularly the case with pop music and electronica, being a singer, and being a young woman, there's just even much more of ‘oh, we know what to do, sweetheart.’
Oh, just being a woman in this industry. A woman that's a singer songwriter, and going into sessions and not producing, that's something that I've experienced my whole life. Men trying to steer me the ‘right way’, like ‘we know this sounds good, we should do this’, and really struggling to listen to what I have to bring to the table.

Do you feel like your songwriting was disregarded in the sense of, ‘you're just a voice, we're here to make it all sound beautiful’?
Yeah, sometimes. Not all the time, but I've definitely had all of those experiences. And I'm sure that's something that most women who write songs have experienced too.

How are you finding the era at the moment, we've still got a long way to go, but there is this beautiful rise of women in the industry. A bit more confidence and celebration and a little bit more appreciation across the board for young female artists. Have you found there's a shift?
Oh definitely. I find inspiration in artists like Barkaa and like Miss Kaninna, being not just strong women, but strong black women, owning their culture, owning their identity, and not being swayed by what anyone tells them. I’ve definitely been feeling that for sure.

And what you’re bringing to the front is this gorgeous, eclectic sound that feels like just the music you like. You’ve got dance, and then you go pop, and then there’s a little beautiful almost folk moment. Is that also just part of that navigating, ‘you know what I like this kind of music, don't stick a genre on it, this is just how I want to sound?
Starting out in music so young, it's really easy to be boxed into ‘this is who you are’. When I started writing songs, I was 16, and my first release was more within the R&B space, and it was so easy to be boxed into that. But it’s hard to make a decision on who I am as an artist when I'm like, 17 years old, do you know what I mean? So the last few years has been this journey of finding who I am as an artist. Even now, I feel like I'm still trying to get closer to the specific sound of who I am. This project is exploring that, all the different genres and things that I can try. I always want music to be something that's fun and I want to be able to play shows and have fun playing it. I want to enjoy the music that I make. I don't want to be making music I don't like, just because it's going to do well.

I want to talk about ‘Incapable’, because it is such a great track and I bet it is a blast to play live too.
I actually wrote that song a while ago, before I even worked on this project. I wrote it I think when we were in lockdown, it was made to like a completely different beat. It was just like an idea that I had and I just kind of left it. But then I played it to a few friends, and they really believed in the hook in the chorus, and when I started working on this EP I brought it to the session and let the producers know what my idea was and they just went through with what was already written. It was really cool to write a song that way, and create music that way, because usually it's the opposite way. Genre wise, it's the one that is more traditional pop-house, it's just a lot of fun.

I love that this was created in lockdown, because we also had your single ‘2560’ out at around the same time, which came at the best juncture when everyone actually just needed a suburban pool party but they couldn’t get to it! You write beautifully from what you know and what you're going through, and it doesn't sound edited, which I think is really beautiful. Have you always written songs like this?
Always. I have always been a creative person, a creative kid. Growing up, I was always making up stories and ideas. I started writing when I was 16, a lot of those songs are probably a bit shit now, but I feel like I've always been someone who has been a storyteller in some sort of way, for sure.

You went to a performance art school, right?
Yeah, a lot of it was more focused on singing and performing in front of people. At one of my recent shows I did, my school teachers came and seriously I was just gonna cry. I felt so like it was just a different, like, kind of feeling. I had a moment where I realised that one of them brought APRA to my school, and a whole other a bunch of people, and she probably was one of the main reasons why I realised I could write songs, I had a skill and I could actually do that, rather than just singing covers and trying to fit in in other ways. So I’m really grateful for that school.

I love that. If you don't see it, you're not gonna feel like you can do it. On that, who were those amazing sheroes of music that you grew up with and just went ‘yeah, that's what I want to do’?
I was obsessed with Alicia Keys growing up. I loved her. I used to do singing lessons, and I used to sing ‘If I Ain’t Got You’, that would be my warm up song. I was obsessed with Beyoncé. I really loved Jess Mauboy growing up as well. It was definitely a lot more in that R&B soul space. Growing up in Australia, I feel like I was influenced a lot more by American culture, in a way, because I felt l like I could see myself more, my identity, in a lot of those artists, like Alicia Keys, like Beyoncé, rather than what was here.

Beautiful. Mayday is out now, what else is coming up for you?
I have a few shows coming up, we have a few, remixes coming out, we have, like the Samoan version of ‘Crash’ coming out, which, like my mum and uncle translated and my uncle translated, which is just so cute Plus a remix of ‘Crash’ as well which is gonna be exciting.

Mayday is out now via Sony Music Australia. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Becca Hatch on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.