I Know Leopard

Since their debut EP Illumina, the Sydneysiders have been getting serious attention from serious corners of the industry, most recently brought to the fore at Bigsound as they previewed their latest efforts on the Another Life EP – a harbinger of the album to come. While lead singer Luke O’Loughlin is not, lamentably, a leopard himself, it is not for lack of trying. Given I Know Leopard are a sure highlight of this year’s Surry Hills Festival, gaining an insight into the genesis of their name might prove a handy launching point.

“I was shopping for a jungle-themed costume party,” O’Loughlin chuckles, “and the store owner could only speak broken English. I told him I was looking for something like a leopard, and he led me down this dark little aisle. I was telling him I’d really like something like a leopard tail, a leopard head if they had one, and he told me they had just the thing. Then he handed me this mask of Chewbacca and said, ‘There you go!’ And I looked at it and said, ‘Umm, this isn’t exactly the kind of leopard I’m looking for.’ And he really didn’t take to it kindly. He threw the mask to the ground and shouted, ‘I know leopard!’ before walking off. We’d been trying to come up with band names at that point, and I threw that one out as a joke. We dismissed it, but a few weeks later, it was still around and had this nice ring to it. ‘I Know Leopard. You know, that’s actually not too bad…’”

While the band’s interpretation of dream-pop does indeed have a fine ring to it, the word also suggests a level of insubstantiality – of something vivid yet fleeting – that masks just how thoughtful and engaging these songs really are. I Know Leopard’s sound is quite layered, and to peel away one aspect is to reveal another implication or inspiration beneath. It’s little surprise these performers can bring such depth, given they are hardly green to their calling. With Jenny McCullagh on violin and vocals, Rosie Fitzgerald on bass and Todd Andrews on guitar, they have a remarkable pool of talent to drawn from.

“I think the dream-pop thing, anything we ever write…” O’Loughlin pauses. “I love major seventh chords; I think those are the chords I like arranging the most. If you hear those, they kind of sound naturally dreamy anyway, and we end up using a lot of those. That’s probably where it all started, though the textures are always differing. I’m happy with that label, though. It tends to be how people first respond when they hear our music: ‘Oh yeah, it’s really dreamy.’ And I like that. I like that kind of music to begin with, those kind of whimsical, celestial sounds. My favourite Beach Boys records were the ones from the ’70s where they had that floaty sound, like they were discovering LSD for the first time. Really happy and goofy, but at the same time quite beautiful and sophisticated.”

Talk then turns to Brian Wilson pushing The Beach Boys into new territory with his frantic, inspired studio shenanigans. Yet although O’Loughlin has an appreciation for those halcyon days of recording, when it comes to pulling together tracks for I Know Leopard, their approach is much more stripped-back.

“It’s weird. I’m not a fan of over-demoing, and I try not to demo very much at all. I like to do very rough sketches of a song, like a verse and a chorus, to keep things as fresh as possible. I find myself getting bad cases of what I call ‘demo-itis’. It’s where I’ll demo something too far and will never be happy with it; I’ll always seek the spark that was there in that first recording that I can never achieve again. I’m hoping the LP I’ve been writing will be half songs that were written before, but I’d really like the other half to be songs that we come up with in the moment, that we start tracking straight away.”

While the band has a slew of performances over the next few months – stretching literally from coast to coast – the first furtive appearance of that LP may not be too far away. O’Loughlin is already plotting the record’s skeleton, and when he speaks of the future, the excitement that creeps into his voice is unmistakable.

“At the end of the year I’m going away to set up a studio somewhere on the South Coast and just start tracking down there. Half planned, half spontaneous. That’s what happened with that song ‘Another Life’ on the EP. It was something that happened on the spot. I think Jenny was on piano just playing a few chords that sounded nice straight away. I like to keep it fresh like that, and I work better with that shorter timeframe. I don’t like extending things too long. But I’m also contradicting myself here. Once the song’s written, I tend to take so much time with all the layers, making sure everything is just as it should be. But the writing of the song I try to get done quite quickly and on the spot. Try and find that sudden magic.”

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