The Holidays share some insight.
Words: Kylie Johnston
Sydney band, The Holidays, burst on to the local indie scene in 2007 and have since managed to back up the hype with last year’s single The Moonlight Hours. The single’s sun-drenched sound landed it at the top of Triple J’s playlist and garnered attention both at home and abroad (remixed by the cool kids at Modular and ended up on an NME download mix-tape).
When I caught up with lead singer, Simon Jones, the band is just off the back of a national support slot with Bluejuice and they have day filled with record label meetings as well as trying to put the finishing touches on their hotly anticipated début Album which should be released in early August.
How is the new album coming along?
Yeah, we’re just kind of putting the finishing touches on it. We’ve done most of (the recording) ourselves which is quite a long drawn out process because we did over, I s’pose, six months or so in various locations and various studios and some of it at home which is a bit disjointed but it’s good because we get to do it at our own speed.
Are you happy with the way it’s shaping up?
Obviously when you work on something over that (amount of time) you kind of go through phases of what you’re enjoying and what you’re not. The songs we (recorded) at the start seem so long ago now that when we go back to them we have fresh ears which is a good thing because usually people do three weeks in a studio and then they’re done.
What can we expect? What is the Album going to sounds like?
Um… well it’s a bit of a mixture really. The two songs that we’ve given to radio are the two most obviously upbeat tracks. It just worked out that way somehow, but the album is a bit more introspective. It’s a lot of mid-tempo, sort of electronic beats and stuff like that.
That’s a bit different. I saw you guys play at a ‘Wolfgang’ in Brisbane quite a while ago and I was thinking that your new singles were a bit of departure from back then…
We found ourselves in a bit of a rut a while back – probably just after that show where we had done this EP and we were getting a bit bored with that really up-tempo guitar stuff we were doing. So, we had a bit of a break for a while and collected our thoughts and eventually starting jamming, and the stuff that was coming out of that was really groove based. I suppose it was function of our drummer, Andrew, is really into hip hop, so he started bringing along slower groove beats which was bit weird to start with, but then we started mixing that with the other stuff we did and we ended up with a lot of slower beat driven songs that still had guitars going on.
That should make the new record very interesting…
It was a mish-mash for at first but we started to refine and found common sounds that we were into.
All of us in the band listen to totally different music so it’s fun just to jam and see what happens. You can’t tell the drummer what to do – he just goes where he wants to and a lot of the songs came out of that.
You’re last single got a lot of attention both here and overseas. Was that really exciting for you?
Yeah. We went down to Falls Festival (not to play just as guests) and at the time it was the most played song on Triple J. It was really weird because we kept hearing on people’s car stereos around the camp site. We were like ‘wow they must have picked it up’. At the time we didn’t know what was going on and then we had friends who had shown no interest previously suddenly wanted to talk about the band, which I thought was pretty funny.
It must mean you are feeling optimistic about the future. You’ve just launched a new single, Golden Sky, are you excited about that?
Yeah, it’s pretty fun introducing new stuff. Especially introducing it via the radio because when you play a new song live it’s a bit hit and miss. It’s hard to gauge the reaction. But when people hear it a few times on radio, it’s pretty nice. Because we’ve sat with these songs for nearly a year so now we don’t even know if they’re any good or not so it’s validating for it to get played on radio.
The new single is still upbeat but it’s a little more ethereal than Moonlight Hours. It a sort of stress and release sound.
You just finished a tour with Bluejuice, how did that go?
It was really good. It was long! It was 6 week tour. It was the first time we’d played any of the new album tracks so we basically got to road-test them and figure what works.
I imagine is a different kind of audience than you’re used to…
It was and initially it was daunting because none of had really listened to bluejuice before and we didn’t know much about their audience except that Triple J play them a lot. So we hoped it was just a general Triple J audience. But the first few show we were thinking ‘Oh crap’ because the audiences just wanted to jump around lots fist pumping. And bluejuice really brought it in terms of (hyping up the audience) and we had written this introspective, groove-based album and we’re opening for this band who as Jake the lead singer describes it, ‘tries to fuck the audience in the mouth’ (laughs) which is yeah a good description of what they do… but different from us.
I actually reviewed that show and I thought it was an odd fit but there were definitely people there to see you guys too…
Yeah, we were basically like ‘this is not our crowd’ so each night we have to set goals of what we want to do with this audience and eventually we got quite good at turning it around. It was nice to see people there with our t-shirt on or who’d come before. That made it a lot easier. Being an opening band is good because there’s no pressure but we’re itching to play shows of our own.
What are your plans for the rest of the year?
Well we’ve got some things in the works that I can’t really talk about but after this single launch we have a proper Album tour in mid-August. We’ll be going to all the more remote locations. Maybe a few festivals later in the year too. A friend once told me to be careful what you put on the album because it’s all you’ll be playing or listening to for the next year so you better like it. But it’s good.
Any overseas plans?
The plan is to hopefully go overseas in September or October. So we’ll see what happens.
You can check the Holidays out this Friday night at Cubbyhole – click here for more info! See you there!