Hatchie is making her favourite music to date. On her latest album Liquorice, the Brisbane-born dream-pop-indie-rocker leans into a more candid and untamed sound. Created in collaboration with producer Melina Duterte ,aka Jay Som, the record explores the messy, exciting and tumultuous time of becoming a young woman. After a long stretch in Los Angeles, Hatchie and her partner-in-life-and-music Joe Agius hit pause on touring and returned home to Australia. Here, she recalibrated, allowing herself to follow impulses and ultimately bottle that shift into Licquorice. Recorded in Duterte’s home studio, with Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint, Courtney Barnett), the album was then mixed by Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman) and finished by mastering engineer Greg Obis (Dutch Interior, Slow Pulp, Wishy). The result is Hatchie at her most most fearless and most irresistibly herself:

Where did you make the album? I guess you made it all over the place?

‍Yeah, it was a bit all over the place. I started writing it in America when I was spending time there at some friends' places, but then I wrote like a third of the album in Brisbane and probably the other third in Melbourne.‍

So are you now based in Melbourne?‍

Yeah, I live in Melbourne, been here for two and a half years.

And were you in LA before that?‍

Yeah. We were like in LA on and off for a while. So I guess actually thinking about the track listing, none of the songs that ended up on the album were written in LA but a few of them were written in New York.

Do you think that you can hear any sort of Australian influence in your sound? Do you think that being here and writing here makes its way into your sound at all?‍

I don't know. I think the feeling of being really far away from the rest of the world influenced my music. Growing up I spent a lot of my weekends on the internet, on Tumblr and on YouTube, and  feeling like that was my connection with the outside world as a teenager - rather than feeling super connected to the people around me. Even though I started this project when I was 25, I think I still had a lot of those feelings carrying over. I think they really influenced the music that I liked and the music that I made. So I think that's the best way to explain it is more so just feeling like that distance.

I've never heard anyone explain exactly how I feel about Australia so perfectly.‍

Really? Oh, that's so nice.

Yeah, totally. Whereas overseas, and it's still a thing  even with  fashion and style, you go overseas and the way you express your creativity can sometimes be much ore accepted than it is here. ‍

Yeah, for sure. No, I definitely felt that. I think especially because I grew up in Brisbane, so it was very small town vibes. It was really easy to feel like you were the only person listening to a band. I really loved that feeling of discovering something and like connecting with people online over it.  I think that's definitely bands like Wild Nothing or any of those shoegaze and dream pop artists that I discovered when I was younger, it felt like no one around me was listening to them.

Do you have a good creative community here now?‍

I think so. I think it really helps having Joe, my husband, we're like into all the same things and that's like what we initially connected over with music. To be honest, I probably feel more of a connection creatively to my friends in America and the UK. Thank God we have the internet to help with that, beCcuse I don't have as many friends in Australia that I like, feel like I'm on the same wavelength  creatively.

Is there a song you're most proud of on this album?‍

Probably Liquorice or Only One Laughing because I felt like when I was writing them, they were the most fun to write and they felt the most different from anything I'd written before. Only One Laughing is really fun to perform. We performed it for the first time last weekend we did the album launch at Triple R. We played live to air and that song was so fun and satisfying and it just felt like it really had that rush of euphoria that I felt when I was writing the first EP. So that felt like a really good full circle moment for me.

What did you learn about yourself and your process through making this album?‍

I think one of the biggest things was learning that I didn't need to push things as hard as I had been in the past. Looking back on the first two albums, I feel like I overworked some of those songs. I really put so much time and effort into them that they lost the spark a little bit.  I think that's always a struggle is listening back to albums and feeling like the demos had a little bit more magic in them. So I don't really let myself go back and listen to demos anymore, because that just makes me annoyed. But I think with this album, I was able to maintain the feeling of the original demos in the final tracks. So I feel they still have that magic and they didn't lose the spark.  I kept them really simple and I tried to keep things just super stripped back in and DIY. I think it paid off.

I want talk to you about the visuals because I love the album artwork and everything you've done. Tell me about making this album come to life visually.‍

Yeah, a lot of that I have Joe to thank for. He’s done all of my visuals except one music video, so he’s really the visual mastermind. With the album cover in particular, that was a real last-minute thing. Originally, all the mood boards I was making had images involving the human body in some way - hands interlocked, two people embracing. I originally wanted the album cover to be a close-up of two people’s bodies connecting. But then I stepped away from that. We did this photo shoot of press photos, and we were going to use one of those as the album cover, just a portrait of me. But when we were editing it, I didn’t really have the feeling I wanted the album to convey. It felt too separate from the sound of the album. So Joe was like, “Why don’t we go back to that original idea of it being a close-up of a body part, but make it your mouth with smeared lipstick, to make it look like you’ve been kissing someone?” So we literally just smeared some lipstick on my face, made out for a second, and then went into our backyard. I lay on the grass, and Joe took some photos of me laughing — a close-up of my face. The whole process took 15 minutes. It was really cool. It actually felt like a snapshot of the joy, euphoria, intimacy, and sensuality that I wanted the record to sound like. It was just an instant yes.

It makes so much sense in my mind, the visual with the sonics.‍

Yeah, thank you. And I love the red. I knew I wanted red to be a key colour of the album, so it was good.

What’s something important to you or inspiring you aside from music that you want to talk about?‍

Movies were definitely a big influence on this album. I think I’m just as much a movie lover as I am a music lover. A big inspiration was watching a lot of tragic romance films. I watched movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Blue Valentine while writing this album, and they really helped take me back to those feelings of intense, overwhelming heartbreak I felt when I was younger. I think I love really hard. When I was younger and would be in some sort of intimate relationship with a guy, I would want things to move very fast. That intensity was a big inspiration for this album. Looking back, those were all what we’d now call situationships, but at the time they were my entire world. I was like, “This is love. Why does he not want me to be the love of his life? Because he’s the love of my life.” And then two weeks later I’d be like, “Oh, that was really stupid.” So watching those movies really helped transport me back to that time and influence a lot of the heartbreak on this album.

Yeah, Blue Valentine will definitely do that to you.
I know, that one’s so sad. So sad.

Okay, last question: what’s next? ‍

Hopefully lots more shows next year. We’re just taking it a lot slower this time. In the past we’d hit the ground running and tour the album before it was even out. But this time we’re trying to give people time to discover the album and get to know it, and then take it on tour. And it already feels like it’s paying off. I’ve had a really nice warm response, and I think it’ll make it that much more rewarding when we finally tour it. Taking things slow, but hopefully lots of shows next year.

I really like that, because sometimes artists don’t give you a second to understand the new music, and you feel stressed to try to know it before you see it.‍

Yeah, exactly. We’re trying to do things differently with every element this time around. And we’ve had that weird feeling where you’re playing an album two days after it comes out and nobody knows half the songs. So I think it’s much more rewarding doing it this way.

Listen to Liquorice HERE.

@hihatchie