A QUICK CHAT WITH HOON
Congratulations on the release of ‘Fried’! How does it feel now the track is out?
Cheers mate, yeah pretty good. Always nice to set things into the wild and see if anyone likes it.
For someone that isn’t familiar with your music, who are some artists you’d compare your sound to?
Over the years we’ve been most referred to a noisier Australian Dead Kennedys. I got told that so often that I didn't want to listen to too much of them. It’s probably better to be ignorant than to be a bite and I don't think we had much hope of doing anything other than what we were doing. The cards were dealt. I think we’ve slowly moved away from that sound with all this new music, it’s less surf rock-punk these days and probably just you know, rock-punk but it's still probably the easiest and most known comparison. We’re a noisy, mostly speedy punk band with riffs and ambient/aggressive delayed guitars. When we recorded, we were listening to shit like Viagra Boys, Idles and Pissed Jeans, and watching/listening to a lot of Australian bands like A Swayze, C.O.F.F.I.N and PF so maybe that came through.
How was the creative process while you were writing ‘Fried’?
It was good and we wrote the track in batches, courtesy of Covid. It’s a bit hard to articulate or really remember the timeframe of it all. We got into all kinds of weird hobbies during the lockdowns so it’s all a bit of a blur. My biggest failure back then was building a glove box to try and make mycelium spawn grain for shiitake mushrooms so yeah, weird time. But yeah, we have a little DIY studio that we used to write and do the pre-production for the track. Using the set up let us capture a lot of improv jams. So, we got to flesh out the song a fair bit before locking it down with Clayton and Angie. They’re both wizards and brought out a lot of strengths and even accentuated our appealing flaws, some people may even say, character.
The video clip is incredible! Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration and shooting of the video?
Cheers, real stoked with how it’s looking. We just wanted to do a hell typical music video. You know, where a band just rocks out in a big empty warehouse with lights and stuff and everything’s dynamic and epic. We don’t have many lights though and we spent all our dosh on vinyl, so we just used an old ass parcan with a blue gel in my dad’s tool shed and filmed it ourselves. That's close enough, right?
The pumpkin head part is the brainchild of our guitarist Orion, he made a real surrealist/domestic clip around Halloween last year starring the pumpkin head. It seemed appropriate to us to bring the pumpkin head into this clip, I’m still not entirely sure why but the impulse was strong, and I love the pumpkin head. The storyline of the idea is loosely based on the ideas of the song which is like; vaguely around making mistakes/not accepting help, so we tried to abstractly convey that. The story shows the pumpkin head trying to fix their broom. After many frantic and manic attempts to fix it, they refuse the help of someone else. Fighting them off, they eventually give in, and the broom is fixed for them - ultimately leading to the restored joy of Pumpkin Head. In a quite abstract way, I guess the moral of the story is, if you can’t fix it, can’t someone else do it?
What is the next plan for 2023?
We’re putting out our first physical record and going on an Australian East Coast tour! We’re hitting most places between Sunny Coast and Melbourne, so really keen to get out and knock out some shows.
HOON 'AUSTRALIAN DREAM' ALBUM TOUR
THU 27 APR | SIDEWAY, NGUNNAWAL/CANBERRA ACT
FRI 28 APR | OLD BAR, NAARM/MELBOURNE VIC
SAT 29 APR | THE RAILYARD, WURUNDJERI/TECOMA VIC
WED 3 MAY | THE HAMILTON STATION, MULUBINBA/NEWCASTLE NSW
THU 4 MAY | MO'S DESERT CLUBHOUSE, YUGAMBEH/GOLD COAST QLD
FRI 5 MAY | KING LEARS THRONE, MEANJIN/BRISBANE QLD
SAT 6 MAY | LITTLE TEMPLE RECORDS, KABI KABI/SUNSHINE COAST QLD
SUN 7 MAY | BANGALOW BOWLO, CAVANBAH/BANGALOW NSW
FRI 12 MAY | THE HOUSE OF MUSIC AND BOOZE, EORA/SYDNEY NSW
SAT 13 MAY | THE MARLIN, MIRYYAL/ULLADULLA NSW
SAT 20 MAY | SECRET VENUE, DHARAWAL/WOLLONGONG NSW