to keep the sunny vibes rolling via end of the year.
The New Zealand synth-pop musical group — comprised of singer and saxophonist Shaan Singh, drummer Matt Beachen, bassist Sam Thomson, and guitarist Ben O'Leary — released their eponymous debut album on Friday (September 27), following up last year's buzzy
EP. The 11 new tracks are a long time coming for the Kiwi quartet, who have gone from busking on their hometown streets to beginning for Camila Cabello and Christina Aguilera; all while elevating their reputation as an electric, instrument-led live act. (It's all in their name: drums + sax = Drax).
Ahead of an intimate hometown gig just hours before the new album dropped, Singh called up MTV News to go via project track by track, giving fans the ultimate guide to
. Check it out:
"Woke Up Late" ft. Hailee Steinfeld
Unsurprisingly, Drax Assignments biggest hit to date opens the album — "Woke Up Late" catapulted the musical group to the international stage, bolstered by a feature from Hailee Seinfeld as well as a
music video starring Liza Koshy.
"In the really early stages of the song, we were like, 'This sort of fits as a duet,' yet we never actually did it," Singh recalled. Soon after the Camila Cabello tour, we got hooked up with Hailee because someone from Camila's team had shown her 'Woke Up Late.' Hailee really fancied it, and she asked us if she might would be on the song. Naturally we mentioned, 'Yes, please!' It was a surreal experience just being this international nobody and then suddenly having this huge co-sign and feature from her. It was a massive deal for us."
"Prefer"
"Maybe New Zealanders overall are quite laid-back people," Singh mentioned of the band's go-with-the-flow attitude, which comes to life on the fan-favorite track "Prefer." Unexpectedly, the song has also became something of a consent anthem immediately after fans listened closely to lyrics like, whichever you prefer / That's what I prefer."
"To be sincere, we hadn't really thought of it like that," Singh admitted. "It's just a song about being nice and kind and it's not something that we attempted to be outwardly like, 'This is a song about consent.' We want people to have the same feeling any time you're with someone of not being forceful and not being overbearing with what you want. Listen to other people and just go with their flow."
"Smart Love"
This finger-snapping ditty was penned as an antithesis to all of the "booty, hoe, ass songs" of the world, Singh mentioned. "We were in the vehicle and I was looking at a random words generator. I landed on the word 'intelligence' and I was like, 'How cool would it be to write a song about being attracted to someone's intelligence?'
"We wrote it in, like, four hours; it was so quick," he continued. "One of my main go to lyrics of that song is from the pre-chorus: 'Stop you're worrying / I think you think also much.' It's better to just to be in the moment and be present as an alternative opposed to worrying about what's happened before and what might happen in the future."
"Relax"
Those cool, calm, and collected vibes flow right into "Relax."
"We completely wrote that song off the guitar line," Singh remembered of this chill-as-hell earworm. "That came first, and we had this melody and these lyrics: 'Hey what happened to you? / You were my best friend, so content.' We wrote the complete song based on that."
"It's funny because I was just talking about that in 'Smart Love,' although it was just writing about how people overthink things also much and have to learn to relax," he went on. "I think each person can relate to that. There's routinely been a time as soon as you mentioned something and someone took it way also far. And like I mentioned, we're all just relaxed guys."
"Natural Selection"
Track No. 5 is, musically, a little bit all over the place, blending jazz, hip-hop, and early-aughts pop. Describing how they fused all those ideas with each other, Singh recalled working with Rogét Chahayed, a producer who worked on DRAM and Lil Yachty's "Broccoli" and Travis Scott's "Sicko Mode."
"I played the sax line first," he mentioned. "We put it through a vocoder and Rogét began playing these super dope chords and we just rolled with it from there."
Lyrically, organic Selection" describes a very specific scenario: as soon as someone wildly attractive begins talking you up and it also seems also good to be true. "It's almost like this self-consciousness, and not believing that this exceptionally good-looking person is interested in you," Singh mentioned. "It's different from these other songs because it's all about an aesthetic attraction rather than a deep one. It's dirty and dark in that way."
"Brain"
The concept of a "heartbroken brain" is one that the musical group had never heard in a pop song before, plus it took on a deeper meaning any time one of Singh's companions pointed out that "Brain" could conveniently be about "orbiting."
"He's like, 'Orbiting is any time while you know about someone's life yet you're not in it. You're looking at their Instagram and you're following what they're doing, however you never connect,'" Singh recalled. "So once the pre-chorus of the song is talking about, 'I'm scrolling your wall, I'm losing my mind / What if I call just to mention hi?' Just imagine this person orbiting someone else's life."
It's clever concept, and also a super relatable one. "I'm orbiting probably 20 people now Singh laughed. "In a good way! I'm pretty sure each person orbits artists. Probably everyone's orbiting Ariana Grande right now."
"Holiday"
The struggles of a touring musician are at the center of "Holiday," which hit residence for the musical group as they traveled all over the world. "It was exactly what we were going through. We got real specific with the song, also it was therapeutic for us to talk about it," Singh dished. "It's a very real song — this year, I was literally calling my girlfriend on her birthday from a hotel room."
At the same time, Singh says they were cautious not to sound ungrateful; immediately considering that, they're in a position so several artists would envy. "For us, it was a really fine line with the song attempt to not sound like we're complaining. We're missing residence, missing our relationships, missing our companions and family member. Yet at the same time, we're exactly where we desire to be."
"Only Us"
"I wanted to write a song that had a sound like Charli XCX's 'Dirty Sexy Cash Singh mentioned. "We began off wanting to create a melody that was steady in staccato like that, yet ended up with this really cool, Calypso-esque guitar line."
The musical group wrote "Only Us" in early 2018 in New Zealand, and it also was finished and released just a couple weeks later. "It's a selfish love song about not wanting to share what you've got with anyone else, and hopefully they feel the same way," Singh continued. "It's sort of awkward as well. I like that."
"Toto"
This sunny, optimistic bop features the memorable line, "I wanna bless the rains and dance away like Toto wherever I go," referencing Toto's "Africa." That 1982 jam didn't directly influence Drax's "Toto," yet Singh says they aimed to conjure the same joyfulness that the classic tune inspires — which wasn't hard to do, considering the musical group wrote it at a particularly cheery time in their lives.
"That song was written the initial beginning day we quit our day jobs, once our manager called and instructed us that we might begin doing music full-time," Singh explained. "So the initial line of that song — 'Quit my job, right now I'm waiting in the rain for the bus' — was a sentence that I discussed out loud to my friend who asked me what I was doing right after I had just quit my job selling insurance."
"All This Time"
"Out of all our songs, we're the most happy that we got to release this one because it's a representation of our live energy," Singh mentioned about this single, which features an absolute monster of a beat drop. "I've had to begin doing yoga to try and head bang a little stronger because that song needs you to head bang."
Nevertheless "All This Time" is a major highlight of their live show, it almost didn't get released right following the musical group struggled to translate its live energy to the studio. "It's just disgusting, to be sincere. A disgusting sax line," Singh explained. "To make it sound good in a recorded context is so hard." Thank the musical gods they figured it out.
"Catching Feelings" ft. Six60
The final track on the album features Drax Assignments labelmates Six60, who met the musical group at a New Zealand festival two years prior. To hear Singh tell it, Six60's Marlon and Matiu gave them some vital opinions about stripping a song down to its bones — just a voice and a musical instrument — as a measure of how solid it actually is.
"They explained it like, 'The song should stand alone,'" Singh explained. "We learned a lot from that, and I don't think we would have written 'Woke Up Late' or 'Smart Love' without it. It gave us a different perspective on how to write music."
The piano outro was performed by Singh's high school friend Leonardo, and the chanting bridge is from March 2017, as soon as the musical group, Marlon, and Matiu recorded the vocals around a solitary microphone. "If you take into account any time that song was written… we were still working at our day jobs," Singh mentioned.
Definitely, a lot has changed for Drax Project since then — and this new album is just the beginning.