Hatchie Is A Keeper

By Michael Tedder


Whether we’re an adult with a full-time career, a busy student, or a buzzed-about indie pop artist, we can all get in a rut. Read an opinions columnist or listen to a life coach and they’ll recommend a collection of ways to get unstuck, from journaling to diet changes to simply going on a walk. Yet for Harriette Pilbeam, the songwriter beyond ascendent dream machine Hatchie, the key to moving forward was, as for several of us, turning to Kylie Minogue.


Last year, Hatchie's EP Sugar & Spice earned international attention for its five songs of waved-out and crushed-out pop, and the musical group embarked on a brief stateside tour afterwards. Pilbeam was working hard on the follow-up, and had made headway on what she knew was an anticipated debut. Her first session in Melbourne with producer John Castle, a Australian knob-twiddler who helmed Sugar & Spice and has also worked with songwriter Vance Joy, had gone wonderful. Then she hit a wall.


"I was feeling a little bit bummed out in October, because I really admired the opening five songs I did on the album, yet I was sort of stuck,” she tells MTV News. “I didn't like anything that I'd since written since. I didn't think that they matched those. I was feeling a little lost, and the clock was ticking."


Over a bowl of vegan ramen several hours before she opens for Girlpool at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, Pilbeam remembers that things started to turn any time as soon as she heard a snippet of music that her live-in boyfriend and collaborator Joe Agius was working on, a danceable track that didn't really fit in with the music lose made before nevertheless which captured her attention nonetheless. "I was like, I love that song, let's try and finish it," she remembers. "I couldn't figure out what direction it should go in, because it didn't sound like a Hatchie song. We were like, 'Let's just pretend we're writing this like Kylie Minogue.' That's how it became what is."


The end result of the Minogue cosplay was "Stay With Me," a highlight of her upcoming debut album Keepsake, out June 21 through the Double Double Whammy. "Stay With Me" is a shimmering, upbeat pop song that retains the important head-in-the-clouds reverie Hatchie customary with the Sugar & Spice EP, while adding a bounce that might get even the deepest introverts onto the dance floor. "We sent it to several companions because we were so excited about it, and so they were like, 'This is going to be on the album, right?'" Pilbeam says. "I was like, no. I'm not doing dance music or something like that. Although then I realized I can do whichever I want on my album. If I love the song, I'll put it on."


Hatchie has been labeled dream-pop since the starting (Sugar & Spice’s "Try" eventually got a remix from Cocteau Twins's guitarist Robin Guthrie). Several of the dream-pop and shoegaze bands she cites as main influences, including not just the Cocteau Twins, nevertheless The Sundays, Mazzy Star, and My Bloody Valentine, were in their heyday a couple of decades before she was place on Earth. She says she discovered them through playlists (she first heard the Cocteau’s immortal single “Lorelei” on a mix Agius made her) and the sort-of-best-of-decade lists your companions in the music journalism-industrial detailed allocate you with. (You’re welcome.) “I got into it a sort of late, because a lot of people get obsessed with that in their teen years,” she says. Shoegaze and dream-pop is music built for the listener to hide out in. However on Keepsake, Hatchie also pulls influence from contemporary favorites like quirky pop stars Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen; she’s right now making music for people that like to get lost, however maybe wouldn’t mind being just a little bit more outgoing. “I just want the melodies to really stick out. I think that's the main difference.”


And if she got over the idea of making music that had to sound exactly like she was known for, her songwriting began to open up. “This is my possibility to skewer a bit,” she realized. “Because I've habitually loved albums that cover a bunch of different sounds. There’s nothing wrong with an album that’s super-cohesive, although I really admired that first Wolf Alice album, where every song is different.”


Before she was working on her debut album, the 26-year-old Pilbeam grew up in sleepy Brisbane, Australia. "The city is tiny. There's one or two zones where people play live music, and there really is one area with clubs, and there's a couple areas with bars, although other than that it's pretty much just suburbia," she says. "It's really vast and quiet. International acts didn't come to Brisbane, they just go to Sydney and Melbourne. It makes us even more isolated than even a usual small town."


Right after graduating high school and auditioning for a music conservatory, she joined some of her companions in the “slacker rock” sort Babaganouj. They did pretty well for themselves in their house continent, even as she notes that “an Australian tour can be two cities,” nevertheless the musical group eventually ran its course and broke up. The order stopped playing about two years back, freeing Pilbeam up to pursue her own creative vision.


"I remember I got an electric guitar and I'd just been feeling really, really down about wanting to be a musician and feeling like I wasn't really doing anything,” she says. “I felt like with Babaganouj... I had a mention in everything, it was very much an equal footing musical group, yet I felt like I wasn't making the music that I really wanted to make."


The first song she wrote on her own, with help from Agius, was "Try," a slice of lovelorn, daydream pop about urging your crush to create a move already. She uploaded the single to Unearthed, the music discovery portal of Triple J, Australia's national radio. "It's guaranteed that someone there listens to it. That's the rule, which is awesome. If they listen to it and so like it, they plan to play it on the radio," she says. "They played it immediately. Within a number of weeks, I had a manager, and I had label interest and was booking shows. I had only written three songs. It was very full on, exhilarating and surreal."


The sudden success has even been a little bit dizzying, Pilbeam admits.


"I still have moments where I'm like, this is so weird,” she says. “Even yesterday, I was doing a photoshoot in New York and I thought it was just over per year ago any time If I quit my job. I was a barista and I was like, it's probably time I quit my job, because I have to go on tour. A couple years prior I didn't think this could be happening."


“Try,” like every song on Sugar & Spice, was inspired by falling in love with Agius, her first real adult relationship. She first met Agius whenever he directed a video for Babaganouj. Today, they live and work with each other, as he makes her videos, some days accommodates with co-writing and production, and plays guitar in her live musical group. "It can be weird spending every minute of day-to-day with each other. Most couples don't do that," she says.


But just as she wanted to open up her sound a little bit on her Keepsake, she also wanted to broaden her subject matter. "Kiss the Stars," as an example, still brings the swoon, while "Secret" is a song inspired by her friend confiding in her about their mental-health struggles. "It's something that we all deal with, and I have a lot of close companions who deal with dark, deep-seated issues." Current single "Obsessed" is also about her companions, and her not-always-healthy relationships with some of those.


as soon as I was younger, I had a tendency to routinely have a best friend, and that best friend was routinely smarter than me, prettier than me, did everything better than me. It got to a point where I would just constantly compare myself to them, to the point where I would ruin their friendship. I would use it as a reflection of myself, I would just be hating myself," she says. "It's a habit I'm really attempting to break as an adult."


Ultimately, by moving past her own ideas of what a Hatchie song could sound like or talk about, Pilbeam was able to tap into her deeper artsy vision, crafting an album full of the sweet melodies and heady atmosphere that won her attention, nevertheless also finds new ways to be herself. She’s boldly assertive and possibly prepared to dance on synth-soaked opener “Not That sort of Girl,” and “Unwanted Guest” is glistening industrial rock for people also polite to enter a mosh pit. Hatchie still sounds lost in the clouds during Keepsake, however right now she’s got both her feet firmly on the ground.


Although while she’s glad she opened up enough to permit "Stay With Me" on Keepsake, there's times she'll work on a song that doesn't feel right for her. Though her debut album still hasn’t however hit shelves, Pilbeam’s already beginning to think about penning songs for other people.


“I don't really feel good about writing a heartbroken ballad, that's not me. Yet I can write it for someone else,” she says. “Its early days, although a proper dream of mine could be to write a song for Kylie Minogue.”