Hands Like Houses

Rather than locking themselves into the ouroboros of a local scene, Canberra natives Hands Like Houses took a more direct approach to launching their career, which resulted in life-changing opportunities. Guitarist Matthew ‘Coops’ Cooper reflects on the group’s career thus far, and how a rock band from a secluded community broke into the international market.

“I really don’t know how we got there, apart from possibly saying that it came down to being in the right place at the right time,” he says. “When we first started to record some music over in Florida five years ago, we were out of school and backpacking anyway. We decided to spend some time in the States and record some songs. Those songs got picked up by the right people and – as cliché as the expression is – like I said before, we were in the right place in the right time. Although we recorded some cool songs anyway, which helped out.”

Still a young man, Cooper has spent the better part of his 20s away from home. With a heavy touring schedule that’s taken him away from a tight community, it’s easy to presume Cooper has become homesick. However, this isn’t the case for anyone in the band, and touring as a group of friends has helped ease this stress immensely.

“It’s an interesting world,” he says. “If you start having the problems that come up with missing home or spending so much time doing this, it’s not a very common problem to talk about it with family members or on tour. It’s a bit of a rare thing to be able to do, in terms of people going away for work all the time, but when you work in the line of entertainment, it’s a different dynamic.

“The last few years have been super hectic; we’ve been at our busiest. Since December last year, we’ve been home for maybe two to three weeks. I wouldn’t even complain. None of us would. It’s pretty unreal being able to do what we get to do. We’re getting older – it’s just about trying to balance it out, going on tour with an open attitude towards trying to make music with an open mind whilst trying to be a human and live a normal life as well.”

By far the most rewarding but hardest tour in Hands Like Houses’ career thus far has been this year’s Vans Warped Tour. The time schedules were stricter than on a headlining tour, but it proved a very positive experience.

“When I say it’s hard, we all worked when we’re back home, so it’s not hard in that respect,” Cooper says. “It’s just a great tour – literally school camp for adults. A travelling circus of craziness. We have a good time, because for one, we’re not working normal jobs. We get to tour around and drink beers for two months straight with our best buds, which is pretty sweet, as well as working and trying to maintain stuff – we’ve found the balance. And just the draw of Warped Tour, what it is or what it has been, it’s a cool thing to be a part of. It’s friggin’ mad. Every tour like that where we see a band that we grew up with has been so good.”

From now until the end of the year, Hands Like Houses will be embarking on an international headlining world tour. Before that commences, they’ll be joining this year’s annual Indent Tour of New South Wales, which offers developmental opportunities for young people in regional areas. Cooper elaborates on what drew the band to the MusicNSW project.

“We haven’t done anything the likes of that, necessarily,” he says. “A few of us work at schools so we’ve done similar programs in the past, but to be part of it as a band is new for us. We were approached with the opportunity, checked it out and thought that it looked awesome. We had some mates doing it last year who said it was rad, so we just said, ‘Hell yeah!’ Get on down to Orange, rural Australia, it’s going to be crazy. We’ve explored more rural America than we have rural Australia before, which is just the way it worked out. But it should be rad.”

Hands Like Houses’ release of their third studio album, Dissonants – due before the end of the year – is the end result of both a figurative and literal journey. Being locked in to such a tight 2015 schedule meant the band had to rethink the writing process.

“Each album has been very different or unique in itself, in the way we’ve approached it,” says Cooper. “This one’s been unfamiliar territory. The first album we did [Ground Dweller], we had years to work on, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. Unimagine was a similar sort of thing; we had a tonne of time to work on it. This one, we had a lot of time to work on ideas, but in terms of being able to jam out the songs and come together in the normal way that we have in the past, we didn’t have that. We had to figure out how to create time to write on the road. It’s been interesting. Now we’ve finished it, we’re all super stoked.”