A.B. Original, the hip hop two-piece made up of Aussie musical mainstays Briggs and Trials, are an important band.
That’s the heart of it. They matter the way a group like A Tribe Called Quest matter, and for the same reason – they craft songs that people actively require, songs with the ability to impact real change. An album like Reclaim Australia, the duo’s debut, isn’t some dalliance, or an exercise in climbing the charts – it is an unashamed ‘fuck you’ to the haters, and a rallying cry designed for all who need to hear it.
“It’s a different kind of story with A.B. Original than anything I’ve done before,” says Briggs. “There’s a bigger meaning behind everything.”
“We’re talking about important shit,” agrees Trials. “The things we’re discussing definitely deserve attention. It’s easy to write a song talking about something political or whatever, but it’s hard to write a good one, where people just listen to it as a standalone song. Specifically with [lead single] ‘January 26’ we wanted to write about really important issues but we wanted to make a banger of a song too. Some people might just have it on in the background and head-nod and they might not realise what we’re talking about is heavy shit.”
In many ways, Briggs and Trials appear as polar opposites – particularly when it comes to their creative habits. “I wrote the songs on the spot, and they didn’t change,” Briggs says of the creative processbehind Reclaim Australia. “Whatever I recorded that first day in the studio ending up [being] the songs … There was definitely a thought process behind it, but the writing was about capturing the moment.”
By contrast, Trials laboured endlessly over the work, taking up his job as engineer and producer with near-manic gusto. “I just completely freak out, over and over again, over one bar of a song,” he laughs. “When other people hear it, they don’t hear the panic and the incessant rage of me hitting my keyboard sometimes. They just hear a bit of music.
“I’m definitely somewhat of a perfectionist. Even with this record, I did all the tidying up of the vocals and the tracking. I don’t like things getting too far out of my hands. I’m not quite sure what it is. It’s not like I’m completely confident about being awesome at what I do. Sometimes having the last say over something just feels good to me.”
But despite their chalk and cheese approach to making music, the duo are united by a deep respect for each other, as well as a driving desire to make the best work they possibly can. “The main goal that was the backbone of it all was just creating an album that was for a young me,” says Briggs. “It was the album that I wished was around when I was a young kid. It was about being 100 per cent fearless about it, and saying things that haven’t been said and going out there and just being ourselves and putting ourselves out.”
A lot of that selfsame fearlessness required the pair to stow their anxieties, and work in a way unfettered by surface-level concerns. “Without sounding like a dick, I really put any kind of self-doubt away,” says Briggs. “This wasn’t the time for that. I feel like that’s a little bit selfish in itself. It was like, ‘Don’t make the album for you … make it for the kids.’ And that’s what I intended to do. To doubt myself [would] be a luxury. You don’t have the luxury to doubt yourself, ’cause you’ve gotta make this record.”
As far as both artists are concerned, the album is set to be released at the best possible time. Trials argues that he and Briggs could never have worked on something so grand in scale early on in their career, and that it’s their sonic maturity one can thank for Reclaim Australia’s unabashed nature.
“That’s the whole thing about this record,” he says. “If me and Briggs tried to write this record back when we first started making music, we wouldn’t have done it right, you know? We felt the same way, and we both grew up in the same communities, but we weren’t ready to make a record like this, I don’t think. So creatively and personally we can now do it confidently.”
Of course, the record is also proving timely given the political and ethical murkiness we now find ourselves mired in. If there were ever a time for a song like the anti-racism anthem ‘Call Em Out’ to drop, it would be towards the end of 2016, a year that has seen the rise of the alt-right, Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson and the thousand other squirming horrors this shitshow of an 11 months has flung at us.
“A lot of people have always said that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” Briggs says. “And if we’re not there, we’re on our way to there.”
But that, he says, explains the record and its bold, powerful stance. “This isn’t just an album of songs. This has never been said like this in Australia. This is very much a, ‘Fuck you. This is our album. Deal with it.’”
Laneway Festival 2017, featuringA.B. Original, is onSaturday February 4 atSydney College of the Arts.Reclaim Australia isout Friday November 25 through Golden Era/Universal.
