Experimental rock duo HTRK formed in 2003 and enjoyed a steady and at times heady rise through the underground ranks. They developed a dedicated cult following of fans and musicians alike and, after releasing a string of EPs and their debut album Marry Me Tonight, seemed to be doing all the right things. Rowland S. Howard loved their music, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fuck Buttons and The Horrors each invited them to tour Europe, and they were enjoying a lot of love from indie media. Then in 2010, bassist and founding member Sean Stewart committed suicide.
Whispers from outside the band suggested it was the end for HTRK, and yet in 2011 they delivered their most successful and impressive release to date, the album Work (work, work). Somehow, out of such jarring tragedy, they had become stronger than ever.
These days, the duo of Nigel Yang and Jonnine Standish are back living in Australia after some time in the UK, Europe and the US. They seem happy to be back and are loathe to criticise Australia – a habit that seems to befall so many artists that return to our small continent. “At the moment I’m living in Sydney and I’m really into it,” Yang says.“After four years in London, it’s really inspiring to be in a humid subtropical climate. I definitely needed to have left Australia to appreciate something as elemental as the weather. Being hyperaware of climate and its influence on mood has added a new dimension to how I think about music.”
“I moved back to Melbourne in early 2012,” Standish adds. “I always find the music scene here at the end of the world interesting. Unique things can happen from insular scenes in far to reach places.It’s primal, welcoming, and full of humour. I have enjoyed running around the Melbourne dance scene again. The people are super cool.”
The follow-up to Work (work, work) will be eagerly anticipated and highly scrutinised, in that love/hate way people appear to approach music with these days – but in the eyes of hardcore fans, it can’t come soon enough. Fortunately for them, HTRK plan on playing a number of new tracks at their At First Sight gig.
“We’ve been recording our new album with Nathan Corbin in New York,” Yang says. “He’s in this band Excepter that we like. We already did some tracks with him last year in Santa Fe, so this is the continuation of that session. We’ve set our stuff up in a makeshift studio in Greenpoint. It’s been great so far; this is the first record that we’ve written just the two of us. The album will come out some time in summer – it’ll sound good at that time of year, we wrote and produced all of the songs during various summers. Most of the album was written in Sydney.”
“We’re releasing the first single at the end of this year,” Standish adds. “Perhaps another Nathan Corbin directed music video, the sequel to the ‘Bendin’ video.”
With their previous album a documentation of grief, written and partly recorded while Stewart was alive, this latest recording is cathartic in a different way. Standish and Yang have written purely as a duo (with some collaborative input) and under much more positive circumstances. The HTRK back catalogue is full of memories for the pair and they appreciate each record in its own right.
“All of our releases still sound good to me,” Yang says. “I think they really capture what we were going through at the time. It’s usually not a big deal playing songs that we wrote with Sean. There is one song called ‘Body Double’ that affects me more than the others. I have a very vivid memory of writing that song with him in my tiny room in London. We had some really strong MDMA that day. We were really sweaty and wasted, trying to figure out how to use Ableton clips and soft synths. We were struggling to focus on the screen. It’s a very fond memory.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
HTRK play Carriagework’s new music festival At First Sight on Saturday July 20.
