Sydney trio PVT announced the completion oftheir fifth album way back in November 2015.
The record, titled New Spirit, finally lands next week, roughly 15 months after the recording process concluded. It’s a sustained delay, but the ensuing period has seen PVT’s name return to the public consciousness, largely thanks to the re-release of their debut LP Make Me Love You and a corresponding stint of touring.
PVT vocalist and keyboardist Richard Pike and multi-instrumentalist/electronics mastermind Dave Miller are both eager to get their new music out there.
“We’re definitely not sick of it,” says Pike. “The good thingwas we weren’t really playing it or doing many gigs, so we’re really excited to do that [now]. I came back to Australia, we did a bunch of rehearsal and we’re really excited about it. That sounds a bit PR, but we actuallyare.”
New Spirit is thefollow-up to 2013’s Homosapien, which was notably the first PVT album to feature vocals on every track. Correspondingly, it had a more pop-oriented sound compared to the instrumental experimentalism of their earlier work. New Spirit tenders another stylistic shift, which is partially a reaction to the previous record.
“You always want to do something different and [the songs on Homosapien] were as pop-structure as we’d done,” Miller says. “And in a lot of ways we wanted to break that. That was one of the focuses.”
“I think every record we do is a reaction to the last one,” Pike says. “I don’t know how it works for other bands, but that’s how we get creative. We feel like we’ve made this piece of art and then we want to feel our way into how to make it better or explore a territory that we felt was untouched or not focused on in the last record.”
The pop focus has been pushed aside on New Spirit,and in its place is an emphasis on left-field electronics. “I felt like we were taking the brakes off on the idea of whether it should be half-[live], half-[electronic],” says Pike. “You know, not being afraid of the computer. Not that we were before, but this album was more of an embrace of electronics than before.
“Over the last few years I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into that side of things, so I just went for it. I started PVT playing guitar and I’ve gotten way more into synths and computers.”
PVT have always been a difficult band to categorise. Terms like ‘electro rock’ and ‘prog rock’ have long been thrown around, neither of which are particularly colourful signifiers. Making genre-specific music is never really the point, but finding a unique stylistic identity is important to PVT. They have one overarching aim when working on new material, and it’s reflected in their ongoing artistic progression.
“What we do talk about is whether something avoids clichés, because clichés are everywhere in music and when you’re writing they pop up all the time,” Pike says. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with clichés, but we make a concerted effort to avoid them, to try and create something that excites us and doesn’t sound like anything else. When I hear something that I can’t understand how it’s made or how it’s put together, that’s really exciting to me. So that’s what we’re always aiming for.”
Although PVT don’t neatly slot into any one genre, they have a well-defined self-understanding, which means they’re occasionally compelled to assess whether something they’ve written has a PVT-appropriate sound.
“We did have a discussion with one song on the record, which was ‘Murder Mall’, and Dave and I actually got into an argument about it,” Pike says. “It was a song that I wrote on my own on a guitar, then we adapted it for electronics and Dave was saying, ‘I’m not sure it’s PVT, I’m not sure it’s something we’d do.’ And I protested because I felt like it fits with the ideas of the record lyrically and it felt new and fresh to me. And I think in the end we made it sound like something we would do, even though the first version maybe wasn’t.”
As on Homosapien, Pike’s vocals are quite prominent across New Spirit, and the lyrics reveal a rather pointed political message. The band released a statement alongside first single ‘Another Life’ that spoke of its aim to fight back against new conservatism and the regressive policies of contemporary political leaders. These are troubling and volatile times, and it’s almost impossible to not have some level of political awareness.
“In some ways it was hard not to [make a political record], because it seemed to be all-consuming and it was hard to think about anything else,” says Miller. “What’s more important than your country going down the toilet? The place you live in and grew up in.”
“It was something we wanted to put back into music,” says Pike. “We felt like at least new acts, younger acts really don’t do it – and especially, strangely, [within] electronic music. It seems to be the realm of rock’n’roll, to be political. But most new music by younger and new bands is in some way electronic these days.
“One of the people I think about is The Knife and their last record, how they just got really angry and went on a real tangent. I found that album really surprising and shocking and I thought, ‘Why don’t people do that in electronic music? What’s wrong with a bit of punk attitude in electronic music?’”
New Spirit’s political conscience specifically concerns Australian affairs, and the band sought inspiration from a shining light of Australian political songwriting. “We started thinking about our background and history and I was even listening to a lot of Midnight Oil at the time,” says Pike. “We realised that no one’s really doing it these days – people are starting to do it again now, because you can’t avoid it. If you’re not writing a love song, it’s the second-in-line thing to write about.”
Despite the weight of the lyrical themes, Pike’s words mightn’t be the first thing to catch listeners’ attention. The majority of the songs appeal on a sensual level at first – they’re sonically immersive and engage the body and the imagination. But the themes haven’t just been included as something to coat the instrumentation. Pike hopes listeners will pay close attention to the lyrics.
“It might be a funny one for people because our background is quite instrumental and electronic, but I like to think you can listen to it completely on that level and then if you dig deeper you’ll find that there’s a lot of thought gone into the songs.
“That’s what you do as an artist, is try and reflect your world in some way and turn it into some piece of music or art that exists in its own world. And I think we’ve done that to a certain degree.”
New Spirit is out Friday February 17 through Create/Control. PVT play atOxford Art Factory onFriday Mach 3, withJack Grace and Willaris. K.
