Over the last decade or so, largely due to the immediate availability of pretty much all music, the lines between traditional indie and pop have blurred almost entirely.
Blossoms are the best example of this; lauded as the latest indie heroes but with a sound that has such a sweet sheen that your teeth are in danger of severe rot. Australia’s Hatchie falls into the same category; the songs included on her latest EP Sugar & Spice are all indie songs but delivered through the kaleidoscope of everything that falls within the increasingly wide parameters of pop music.
Pop music is irrevocably linked to the 1980s, but at what point does music stop sounding like it’s from the 1980s and start to sound contemporary? Here we have a clear contender to answer that question and, more importantly, end that comparison.
Without question, Sugar & Spice has all the hallmarks of great pop music; great hooks (Bad Guy), earnestness (Try, an instant pop classic, which it was on release last year) and an edge and diversity to the vocals on the title track. But it also has more than a hint of shoegaze and other reverb-led guitar music. There is a deft psychedelic wistfulness to Sure which also echoes both Wolf Alice and the arpeggio-driven highs of The Smiths’ more sumptuous moments.
The rapid fire of Bad Guy’s chorus, which sounds not unlike Blur’s classic The Universal, is delivered with a weary breathlessness that perfectly suits Harriette Pilbeam’s (for it is she) vocals. In fact, across the whole EP Pilbeam covers quite a range of emotions without really stretching her lungs too much, which bodes well for when she does let loose.
Heartingly, Hatchie is a multi-instrumentalist in the vein of Peaches and St Vincent. Whilst she is operating in an increasingly competitive field, this offering shows there is certainly room for more.
Otherwise they’d better make some.