A Quick Chat With The Toothpicks

Sydney’s indie-rock darlings The Toothpicks have returned from an 18-month release drought with their bruising, triumphant single ‘Gimme All Your Love’, out today. Boldly reimagining the iconic Alabama Shakes original, it should come as no surprise that this single showcases a newfound confidence, swagger and vitality for the band that can only be learnt the hard way: up on the stage. We caught up with them to find out what they’ve been up to since their last release and learn a bit more about this track.

Give us a quick introduction to your sound.
We aim to keep it raw and human, minimising effects and manipulation. We love dual guitar lines and vocal harmonies. We’re hugely inspired by artists like Jeff Buckley, The Beatles, Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse and The Strokes.

What does this track mean to you?
For us it isn’t about romance. To love in any sense is to be vulnerable and exposed, and that can be absolutely terrifying. To us, ‘Gimme All Your Love’ is a desperate plea to resist the temptation to retreat inward, and to realise that our emotional battles need not be fought alone.

Tell us about the recording and production process for Gimme All Your love.
To keep things as raw and resonant as possible, and honour our emotional interpretation of the song, we recorded the track completely live, without a metronome. This was at Studios 301 - we’d previously won a day of recording through a band competition and thought this was the perfect way to cash it in.

We’d initially planned to just use one live take, but when we started working on production we got a little lost in the sauce - we started comping and editing, and ended up warping the song quite out of shape over the course of 2 months.

We listened back to an unedited take on the recommendation of a new producer and realised we’d a lot of the song’s feeling. We ended up scrapping all the editing and going back to the live take!

We sent it to Anton Hagop (Silverchair, Powderfinger, Birds of Tokyo) for mixing, and George Georgiadis (Hockey Dad, The Vanns) for mastering.

It’s been 18 months since you last released music, but it seems you’ve been super busy in that time. What have you been up to?
We’ve been working hard on our live show, gigging as much as possible and showing up as much as we can in the scene! We had some honestly insane nights because of it - we opened for bands like Lime Cordiale, The Smith St Band, Pacific Avenue, made a whole lot of new friends, ran into a guy who gave us free tix to Foo Fighters, were VIPs at a Teenage Dads show and played the opening night of VIVID Sydney (thanks to The Push!). Outside of that, we’ve been using the time to hone our catalogue. It’s been a lot of fun.

What was it like playing at VIVID?
It was very surreal - easily the biggest stage we’ve played and the biggest production crew we’ve worked with. We were really well taken care of.

You were recently crowned Sydney’s Hardest Gigging Band. How did that come about?
We made it our business to seek out gigs and never say no to offers - we’ve played up to 3 gigs on the same day, and up to 5 gigs in a week. In 12 months we played 97 shows - it relied on the whole band keeping all their Friday and Saturday nights available. Being asked to play is an honour, and we get better every time. The sydneymusic.net team (who do awesome work for the community) worked out which bands were gigging most in Sydney from their gig guide statistics. We’re chilling out with gigs now and will follow more of a strategy moving forward!

Gimme All Your Love is out now

Toursaustralianmusicscene18 October 2024