MUSIC INTERVIEWS “I feel really proud of it and I feel like I’ve learned a lot through making music, especially the last album The House,” Maine explains. “I feel like I learned a lot about what I want to achieve through making music and the sort of relationship I want to have with the music I put out and I felt very determined to make the best possible piece of music that I could make. “I was looking back to where I was when I was making Pool and how I really clicked with it and was really in the headphones paying as much attention I could to every sound and every word, to just be as deliberate as I could this time around. I made it at home and did majority of the production myself and I feel myself there and I think like I’ve improved. “I tried to experiment with my voice and vocal takes and my delivery, and I was able to hear my music with a little more perspective. I just want to outdo myself each time – that’s the idea.”
Porches Find Their Clarity The year 2013 saw us Slow Dance in the Cosmos with Aaron Maine, better known as Porches. In 2016 we took a deep dive into Pool and in 2018 we entered The House. Now in 2020, Porches invites us into the world of Ricky Music.
Recorded in his New York apartment from December 2017 to the US spring of 2019, Maine documented the rollercoaster of emotions he experienced throughout the time. He describes it as “an account of the beauty, confusion, anger, joy and sadness”, but mostly what this album represents is Maine’s tireless search for clarity. “It was me trying to remember why I make music and what I enjoy about making music,” he reflects. “I think I lost track of doing it for me and how much you have to love it for it to translate. I was just trying to get back to a sort of fruitful place where it’s absolutely a labour of love.” “There are moments of clarity on the record for sure,” he continues. “Emotionally, and even as an artist, I feel like there’s clarity in that world, as well as being surer of what I’m trying to say and being comfortable with what I’m trying to communicate and how I share it.”
Needless to say, a decade removed from their breakthrough, the band themselves had no idea what was in store for them when they hit the mainstream. “We were not prepared for how big things were going to get,” says Thom Powers, who plays guitar and sings in the band. “We were excited, for sure, and we thought we’d done something special. I think we’re only fully able to appreciate that time in our lives now, though – hindsight, getting older and plenty of life lessons have followed.” “I feel like we’ve been competing against ourselves for ten years,” adds Alisa Xayalith, the band’s vocalist and keyboardist. “We set such a high standard for our writing and our sound back then, and songwriting is still such a mystery to us. When you’re putting the pieces together and you make something that you like, though, you’re still really excited by it. No matter how puzzling things can get, there’s always something so rewarding about that.”
The Naked & Famous Go Back To Basics After a steady build in their native Auckland through the latter half of the 2000s, The Naked & Famous came bolting out of the gates at the dawn of the new decade. With the release of their debut album Passive Me, Aggressive You, the synth-wielding indie darlings were propelled to stardom – not least of all thanks to their quintessential double-up of hits, “Young Blood” and “Punching in a Dream.”
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This process has lead Powers and Xayalith to Recover, the first Naked & Famous record in nearly four years and their fourth overall. In between the release of 2016’s Simple Forms and now, the group has gone through a considerable overhaul and reboot – once five members strong, TNAF has reverted to a duo. This shift within the fold of the group, however, has not hindered their artistic vision. If anything, it’s helped to re-calibrate it and come at their new LP with a newfound sense of focus. “There’s a point as a songwriter where it crosses over,” says Powers. “You’re writing something, and it goes from being exciting because you’re a writer to being exciting because you love music. When you hit on that reaction in the process of making songs, it’s very obvious. That happened a lot when we were making this record – there’s a little video we posted to our Instagram a little while ago, and it’s of us writing the track ‘Sunseeker.’ You can see how excited we are in the room, and it felt really fresh to us. You never want to assume you’ve written a hit or anything like that, but you do get those kind of moments that are really special.”
“I think it’s something that I was actively looking for, for the first time, in my personal and professional life.” The result – a distinctly coherent and concise songbook of eleven tracks. These can be attributed to the collaborative nature of the writing and recording, as well as Maine’s willingness to absorb ideas and input from those around him. Ricky Music features the first co-production effort by Porches with Unknown Mortal Orchestra bassist, Jacob Portrait, along with guest collaborations from long-time friends like Mitski, who features on the track ‘Madonna’. “I’ve known Mitski for years and I do enjoy working with people and hearing other people’s voices specifically on my album – I think it’s such a breath of fresh air,” explains Maine. “She was in town the week that I was in the studio recording and we laid down heaps of ideas and tracks and that’s the one we decided on.” Collaboration for Maine is more about personal connection than a solely musical one, preferring to enlist friends he’s made through various avenues. “I like the idea of bringing in people that I encounter and spend my time with to appear on the album, and make it feel like the picture is even bigger.” BY TAMMY WALTERS
Ricky Music is out now through Domino Records.
Recover is less bombastic and forthright as an album like Passive Me, Aggressive You – but, in a way, that’s kind of the point. It’s an album of peaks and valleys, of subtleties and delicacy. You could even perceive it as The Naked & Famous growing up. For Xayalith, it was simultaneously about meeting expectations of quality while also subverting expectations of sound. “The main thing I was asking myself is what do people want out of The Naked & Famous in 2020,” she said. “What do we want out of it? I was really trying to lead us to a place where we could evolve musically and creatively. We’re very different people to the ones we were when Thom and I started this band. We’re still interested in challenging the status quo, but we’re still aware of what we’ve created for ourselves over the years. “There were months of harrowing self-doubt in there, with lots of argument and debate. We had to pause and take a break, but when we came back to it we wrote the title track to Recover. It made the whole album really feel like a sort of restoration process. We thought maybe we weren’t going to do this anymore, and here we are.” BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
Recover, the new album from The Naked & Famous, arrives on Friday May 8 via Island Records.
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