In late November, Brisbane indie-pop trio, The Grates, released their new album, 'Dream Team'.
Guitarist John Patterson explains why this was their speediest release to date. “We've usually spent quite a bit more time recording the songs in the past and this time we spent six days in Sydney recording it. Whatever we had at the end of it was what the record is now. We just tried to be smart about how we spent our time.
“Owen Penglis from Straight Arrows produced and we just smashed it out. The last [the album] we made took ages and was particularly painful and the only way we were going to make a record this time was if it was fun and easy; before we started working on the record we decided to make sure it was fun and easy the whole time.”
The album was self-released under the band's own label, Death Valley, which granted the trio more freedom than a conventional, label release. “There are so many opportunities when you do things yourself,” John enthuses.
“You can do so many things faster and try so many different things that you can't do when you're tied into the real-label system. We can just sell a Dropbox link or something when we're doing it ourselves without anyone telling us what we can and can't do. There's no lock on any of the things we are trying to sell.”
For John, the sound of ‘Dream Team’ is paradoxically rugged and well produced. “To me it's both polished and unpolished. We rehearsed but then when we did perform we just did a couple of takes, and we recorded with really nice mics and stuff, but apart from that we were just using whatever shitty stuff of our own that was around. In some ways it's like polished nastiness.”
The Grates' approach to writing is free and easy. Forcing it is just not their style. “It was getting less and less organic so with this record we said 'if it's not easy to write we are just not going to write it, we'll just move on to something else'. So if it flowed out easy it ended up on the record and if it didn't we just didn't do anything with it. Once we knew not to chase things up that weren't working straight away, we just wrote songs that we liked from then on.”
Singer Patience Hodgson loves to fill her songs with in-jokes and references to local characters and mates. “[Lead single ‘Holiday Home’] is about a girl we know who was calling out her boyfriend about something and she was like 'you want to get in this holiday home? This is where you come to relax!' or something like that. She was referring to her body as a 'holiday home' and Patience thought it was really funny so she started trawling through this girl's Instagram and writing lyrics about it. I think she's cool with it though!” John explains.
John and Patience co-run Southside Tea Room [their cafe/ bar in Morningside, Brisbane) alongside their band commitments. “For the first couple of years of running [Southside] we didn't have any time for bands at all because it was just too brutal, and we just had to be there all the time to make sure everything was running smoothly. But after we got to about two years in we started getting weekends off and that's when we started making music again,” John says.
Drummer Ritchie Daniell has played in the band since 2013 having originally been hired as a barista at Southside. “He's worked there almost since the start. He worked there for probably six months or a year before we played together. We already knew each other really well so it felt like a real band, it didn't feel like we were just getting some drummer to play on our songs.”
Far from causing friction in the ranks, the full-on work/ band relationship serves to strengthen the creative connection between John and Ritchie. “We were working like 40 hours a week together in the shop so we were already awesome friends. We were always showing each other music and bonding over stuff so it was really easy. We're not really over thinking anything in the band room so it's just a way of being away from work, even though we're together it's a different thing.”
For John and Patience, the band will have to take a back seat for at least a short while as they welcome a new addition to The Grates line-up. “We've got nothing planned! We're having a baby in six or seven weeks so we are going to do that and then make plans when we are ready!”
‘Dream Team' is now available.
