From the wilds of northern NSW, alt-rock trio Mecha Mecha have released their new single 'Greedy Boys', presenting a different side to the band's songwriting.
'Greedy Boys' is the first time Mecha Mecha have written with a more restrained creative approach, producing a radio-friendly pop track. “It was quite challenging for us to write like that because it's a bit more traditional in its structure,” frontman Walter Webb says.
“Keeping a song under three minutes for us is quite hard because we don't normally write with restrictions, which I don't think is a testament to good songwriting, I think it's more of the way people do it in metal. There's a certain difficulty in refined pop songwriting, which we learnt with this song. It was quite hard to keep it focussed and keep it short, which is good for us to do.”
The song also has the band stepping towards maturity, acknowledging the supportive roles played by the women in their lives as Mecha Mecha have pursued their dreams of musical glory. “We feel that a lot of musicians I know take a long time to grow up and it's what allows them to keep churning out lyrics... The flip side of that is that they're not very functional people,” Walter says.
“My bandmates for example, we're only able to do what we do because the women in our lives are supportive of us. There's an expectation in our society that men can take a bit longer to grow up than women do and we're just acknowledging that I think.
“It's a general nod to the fact boys can still be boys for as long as they want while women have to get their sh.t together over a small period of time compared to men. There's a lot of heated social politics at the moment, and across the board I think most people would agree women have to move a lot faster than men do.”
'Greedy Boys' is driven by a bombastic bass with the violin of Isaac Vincent stepping into the space usually occupied by lead guitar. Walter explains how the sound of the song developed from a previous release.
“The most success we've had from a single is when we released a song in 2017,” he says.
“It was released right at the same time as Royal Blood with their new album, and what we noticed was that beefy, lead bass tone was back and hadn't been back since the late '90s, so this kind of uncompressed, ugly, bass lead tone was suddenly a thing again. We've looked at how they treat the bass as a lead instrument and I've been experimenting with that as a bass player.”
Mecha Mecha launched 'Greedy Boys' with a show at Woolly Mammoth in July and are now preparing for their next phase of releasing new material by drip-feed over the following months.
“We're actually recording an album,” Walt says.
“We weren't going to call it an album at first because when you release an album it can disappear into the ether, so we're going to be releasing singles for the next couple of months instead of the album until it's worth releasing that album, so it might be a while before we have a major release. Mostly we'll be doing singles and we're announcing a tour shortly as well.”
