Perth band Coterie recently released their new single, 'Where We Began' (their first with Island Records Australia), a powerful song stemming from a friend's broken soul.
The band consists of four brothers – Tyler, Brandford, Joshua, and Conrad Fisher – and while this is their first release with a major label, the group have been playing music for as long as they can remember.
“It sounds super cliché,” lead singer Tyler admits, “we are literally that cliché; we have been playing together our whole lives, even to the point where now with hindsight, we can see now that our parents slightly manipulated us into a band.”
While Coterie is composed of four brothers, they're adamant they want the band's music to do the talking rather than being just another 'family band'. “We don't want our band to be about anything other than our music,” Tyler says.
“We've seen a lot of gimmicks, you kind of see that stuff on TV and occasionally hear it on radio, I guess depending on what you listen to. We didn't want Coterie to be about anything other than the music we're making.”
While they may have been creating music from a young age, the band are still coming to terms with the reality of being signed to a major label. “Surreal, it doesn't feel real,” Tyler says.
“We're from Perth; nothing happens over here. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, you can go down to the beach and there's ten thousand people walking around in shorts and thongs. Like no one really pushes for this kind of thing to happen over here, it's just completely absurd.”
'Where We Began' is a gut-wrenching song inspired by a real-life incident where Tyler had to talk a close friend down from a metaphorical ledge. “He pretty much on the phone said, 'listen man, I can't do this anymore' and pretty much, without using any trigger words, he was ready to call it quits on life. He was in a pretty dark place, very hurt.
“I said 'stay on the line while you head over here'. Then he came to my apartment, he knocked on my door and I opened the door and just grabbed him and threw him into my apartment and just told him 'look, this isn't happening, we're gonna talk this out. I've got your back.'”
After working through the crisis, Tyler was left with an emotional weight on his shoulders as he went to visit his brothers.
“It was a pretty heavy feeling in the room; one of my brothers said, I think it may have been Josh, 'it sounds weird but I think that musicians, artists, creatives in general can be fairly emotionally driven, and to bear that burden of someone else, it weighs pretty heavy'.
“So we had to kind of deal with that and it came out in 'Where We Began'; we were jamming and the lyrics fell into place. I think melodically, as I was wearing that hurt of his, all the right things were expressed quite naturally.”
While the band doesn't always draw inspiration from such powerful moments, they do try to express emotion through their music. “We have a lot of music people haven't heard, like super unreleased, but they come from places like that as well, just trying to take hurt that we see in our friends or family, and then pouring it into music so that our music is saying something [meaningful].”
Coterie will showcase at 2019 Australian Music Week (Sydney), which runs 6-10 November. Coterie also support Missy Higgins and Meg Mac at Kings Park & Botanic Garden (Perth) 1 February, 2020.
written by Robert Carswell
