Oh Pep!

It’s not as though the Melbourne duo’s international profile has come easy, nor have they quite conquered the world. But their extensive touring of the Northern Hemisphere in the last 12 months, gaining a raft of positive press at CMJ 2015 and SXSW 2016, is pretty impressive considering their debut album hasn’t even been released.

Founding members Liv Hally and Pepi Emmerichs have been working hard on this project for a number of years, releasing three EPs in the lead-up to their Stadium Cake LP. Since the beginning, they’ve been eager to turn Oh Pep! into more than just a local band.

“I think that our main idea the whole time, even before we had a recording, was that we wanted to have a band that toured internationally,” Hally says. “I guess this is us doing that now.

“It’s funny because we always wanted to be doing this touring, and we are doing it now, but you couldn’t have told me five years ago that this is exactly what it would feel like, and touring would incorporate all these different things. So it’s awesome, but at the same time I wouldn’t have known this is what it would feel like exactly.”

As a band looking for somewhere to grow up, there’s hardly a better place to choose than Melbourne. The city is loaded with talented musicians and stacks of venues catering to all manner of styles. Being surrounded by such large quantities of artists assisted Oh Pep! in distinguishing their songwriting from the multitudes of other folk and alt-country acts, as Emmerichs explains.

“I think Melbourne has such an incredible scene and the more that we’re away, [the more] I come to realise how lucky we are in Melbourne,” she says. “There’s this great culture of everyone playing in a band and everyone playing shows and [playing] original music, and there’s so many great songwriters.

“Having so much going on all the time is really great when you’re building a band up, because you have to somehow shine through everything else that’s going on by doing your own thing. And playing lots – we did a lot of shows in Melbourne two or three years ago, basically every week, maybe more than once a week. That really built us up and got us used to performing, and everything else started to happen after that. I feel proud to be part of the Melbourne scene and I feel like we’re a good product of it.”

Stadium Cake comes out this week, but it’s actually been finished since last August when the pair jumped over to Canada’s Nova Scotia region to work with producer Daniel Ledwell (Jenn Grant, Fortunate Ones). A couple of songs from last year’s Living EP (‘Tea, Milk & Honey’ and ‘The Race’) have survived onto the album, while others were written just prior to the recording process.

“I think we were so keen to see what we could come up with before we went into the studio,” Hally says. “So we just pushed it really hard and then a bunch of songs came – like ‘Doctor Doctor’was written a few weeks before.”

“And then we ended up cutting a lot of songs when we got to the studio,” Emmerichs adds. “It was like, ‘We’re going to have to decide what ten songs we’re actually going to record,’ and we had quite a few more than that. You have to choose the songs that really work together, because an album’s different from what we’d done before with the EPs.”

More than this, the album expands upon the band’s earlier releases. The folk and country tint is still apparent, but it’s augmented by conspicuous pop hooks, sombre indie rock sounds recalling The National and Arcade Fire, and layers of horns, strings, vocal harmonies, electric guitar and rock drumming.

“We’ve always listened to heaps of different stuff, so I can’t say influences have changed dramatically,” Hally says. “But I think there’s more comfort in what we like. There’s kind of a settled feeling in the choices we make, and how we make choices. That’s probably just a result of having recorded a couple times before and just growing into the band that we are now.”

Apart from Oh Pep!’s ability to draw on their experience, Stadium Cake’s lush, layered sound indicates that some money went into its production. The album is coming out via the respected indie labels Dualtone Records in the US and Barely Dressed in Australia. However, the labels weren’t in the band’s ear during the album’s construction.

“No-one was on board at this stage,” Hally says. “We had a grant – I think it might’ve been the first one we’ve ever got – that helped record the album. But the album was recorded before anything else had been locked in. Sure, we had management on board and we had a producer, but there wasn’t that much pressure.”

“It was more just the pressure from ourselves,” Emmerichs continues. “We’d been making these EPs and preparing to record an album for a while at that stage, and then we found our producer and there was this big push of, ‘Oh, what other songs can we come up with?’ That was really our own pressure.”

“We wanted to make the best debut album we can,” says Hally. “You only do it once.”