Hatchie turns up the dials on her second studio album.
We’re letting you in on some tips of the trade here, but after listening to Giving The World Away a few times we did a word cloud consisting of terms or phrases best associated with it.
This helps the process sometimes, and what fell out onto the paper were things like shoegaze, dream pop, Liz Fraser, atmospheric and…lovely.
Lovely is the kind of thing your gran uses to describe a nice cup of tea or a sunny day, so sorry about the anachronistic take. And yet, for all its triviality, it works.
Even to get to album number two was a journey for Brisbane-born-but-now-LA-resident Harriette Pilbeam – AKA Hatchie – that involved a leap forward in songwriting, sonics and self-belief.
She isn’t the first artist to release a debut album and then wonder what the point to all of this is, but the internal dynamics were profound, resulting in a mindset which she says: ‘Even though it’s my third release as Hatchie, I feel like I’m rebooting from scratch.’
Maybe the unspoken here was that this was necessary because, taken at face value, her older music lacked the dynamics to make people love or hate it.
Now, the follow-up to 2019’s Keepsake – produced by Jorge Elbrecht (Sky Ferreira, Japanese Breakfast) and which again prominently features Joe Agius and Beach House drummer James Barone – pivots to a bigger, more ambitious noise that’s much harder to dismiss as too polite.
No time is wasted: opener Lights On is inspired at least in part by the peerless gothic chanteuse Siouxsie Sioux, but whilst it chimes like an almost perfect 90’s/20’s chimera, lyrically it explores the nature of a physical attraction which overpowers the nagging doubts of insecurity, and in doing so forms a gleaming marker.
With nothing off limits, the singer takes advantage of her new freedom: This Enchanted opens like an early 90’s house banger, complete with a funky guitar chop and a chorus which throws a spell around itself. On the retro sweep of Twin she also shares territory with fellow countrywoman Hazel English, a space in which the pop world is almost within reach.
There is a purpose too that goes beyond mere aesthetics; Take My Hand, for instance, was inspired by an entry in the Red Hand Files, Nick Cave’s free spun ongoing conversation with everyone. In it the Bad Seed did good work by responding to a young woman suffering from issues stemming from body confidence. His reaching out fixed nothing, but started a conversation.
Reinvention’s fine, but doubtless some will miss the ‘old’ sonic cathedral of sound Hatchie. They’ll be kept on board by The Key, which bathes in an FX-pedal driven stew of overdubs and Cocteaus resonance. This feat is mirrored on the splintery Quicksand, in words handling the paralysis of guilt about something earned in the past that can stain both the present and the future.
This is the face of a blank sheet of paper getting intentionally muddied, but every experiment reaches its limits and the outer marker here is The Rhythm, on which beats, either discordant or syncopated, are king on a track which defiantly stands in a place on its own amongst glossier contemporaries.
So, let’s do the closing bit for Giving The World Away, word cloud in hand. Dream pop? Surely. Shoegaze? In spades. Liz Fraser? Like she’s in the room.
Lovely?…yes Gran, it’s that too.
