A QUICK CHAT WITH KITSCHEN BOY

Can you tell us what this track means to you and what you want people to take away from it?

Happy Place is a story of anxiety and panic. For me it’s part frustration and part acceptance of a life under these circumstances, acknowledging that it's definitely hard but also reassuring myself that I have the tools to deal with it.

If our audience were to take anything from the track it’s that the techniques are valuable; make yourself a happy place, use your breath work, as silly as it feels it’s helped me through many hard times.

Who are some of your influences and why?

This track has been heavily influenced by our idols in the jangle world like Ducks Ltd. and A beacon School but thematically references my teenage love for Jamie T and his album ‘Panic Prevention’ which was super impactful for me as a kid in broaching topics of mental illness in a tongue in cheek manner and slogging through the hard times in a playful and nihilistic manner.

What's the creative process for you, from writing through to recording?

The writing of Happy Place is a unique example, I remember Carlos and our producer Nick sending Me (Dylan) the instrumental demo while I was driving to Wilson’s Promontory. I was so taken by the mood of it that I thrashed it in the car humming out bits and pieces until I had the whole song figured out. When I got to the prom I had a friend play the demo on a speaker, hit the voice recorder on my phone, sang the whole thing through and sent it off to the others and that was that. We then got in the studio together the next week and jammed through the rest of it as it all just fell into place which was an unreal experience.

If you could collaborate with any artist, who would it be and why?

Right now if we could collaborate with any artist it’d be Slowdive; we’re super excited at the moment of merging our jangly moods with a more noisy shoegazey wall of sound sort of energy. I’ve always loved the moments when you’re able to tweak a melancholy heartstring in a song and strike a happy-sad chord with instrumentation and lyricism which we’re currently playing around with in our writing through heavier delays and big swelly reverbs so to collaborate with masters from that field would be a dream.

When not working on music, what other creative outlet/s do you have?

In my spare time I’m always buried in projects, be they automotive or design oriented. I’ve spent my adult life head down building old toyotas into fun little stylish machines and now work a couple days a week restoring cars as well as in recent years I’ve been working for a lighting design studio and spending spare moments doing anything from making unique lights for my home to jewellery or little personal effects like knives, carabiners and bottle openers. 

Who are some local bands we should check out?

Local legends who are definitely worth checking out are The Velvet club, I love their track ‘Love Me The Same’ for it’s fuzzy jangle goodness. The Mirrors are a band we’ve played with and love, ‘I’ll Stay’ is a banger. We also love Body Maintenance for their post punk oomph, their track ‘The Spiral’ is a favourite.

Winter or summer and why?
Living in Melbourne gives you such a beautiful disparity between the seasons, getting to watch each roll through and change the way you live is better to me than any single mood in perpetuity so for me it’s the transitory nature of spinning around the sun that really pleases me.

What else do you have planned for 2024?

This year we’ll be releasing EP number two which was a massive labour of love and we can’t wait to have it out. Alongside this we’ll hopefully be playing our first international shows in NZ which will be a riot. From there we’re just excited to play and write as much as we can.