Pioneers of indie rock, The Shins are returning to our shores this December in celebration of the release of their fifth studio album ‘Heartworms’.
“I’m so excited, the whole band are super excited,” the group's singer-songwriter and producer James Mercer says.
“We’ve got a few people in the band now who have never been to Australia, and the look on their faces when I told them… they were just flipping out. It’s the perfect end for what has been maybe the most enjoyable tour cycle I’ve ever experienced. So we’re super stoked.”
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James, along with new bands members Yuuki Matthews (bass), Jon Sortland (drums), Mark Watrous (guitar, keys, vocals), Casey Foubert (guitar) and Patti King (keys) have been on the road since ‘Heartworms’ dropped in early March, playing headline shows across the US, Canada, UK and Europe, joining a myriad of festivals along the way including Lollapalooza.
“We’ve been having a lot of fun,” James says.
“The festival shows have been going better than ever for us… and we’ve been playing bigger shows than we had in the past which is always a good sign.
“I think I’ve been much more emotive and much more comfortable on stage which has turned into a much more emotive and enthusiastic crowd. I feel like I’ve loosened up a lot on stage for some reason. I’ve been maybe crediting just sort of getting older and not worrying as much you know? Not feeling as self-conscious you know?
“I’ve had a lot of experiences maybe since the last time we came to Australia. You know, touring with Broken Bells [side project with Danger Mouse].
"That last run was kind of a challenge because it was a lot of tracks and computer-control stuff and a lot of focus on the vocals, and now this tour with The Shins is a real rock & roll tour and it’s a lot more open and filled with unknown variables. It’s just been really fun and cool.”
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Written by James, ‘Heartworms’ is the first self-produced record from The Shins since their debut album ‘Oh, Inverted World’, released in 2001.
Headlined by lead single ‘Name For You’, ‘Heartworms’ has been charting in the Top 20 in the US, UK and Australia. “Playing the new stuff has been really cool.
“We’re not playing a tonne of it -– I think we’re playing an even share of the new record with the old records – but it’s been really well received.
"The song that surprises me how well it’s received actually is ‘Painting A Hole’. It goes over really gangbusters every night, so that’s been kind of cool because on the record that’s kind of the least like any of the songs we’ve recorded in the past I’d say.”
Asked how the new line-up is feeling, James responds: “It’s feeling really great. We have a million conversations on our WhatsApp where it’s all bullshit jokes from somebody who’s half asleep in the bunk to where are we going to go for breakfast or 'hey, I’m going to the museum who wants to go?'.
"We’re getting on super well and it transfers right onto the stage. I mean, we’re all working hard and I’m definitely filled with gratitude for all the work that everybody’s doing for me out there.”
The camaraderie has resulted in a soon-to-be released flipped version of ‘Heartworms’ called ‘The Worm’s Heart’. “After we played a few shows with this new band I had kind of fallen in love with everybody and we came into my studio and we re-recorded the whole record in sort of a completely oppositional way.
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“Any aesthetic that we found on the version that I had produced we would do the opposite, and it happened in like the course of two weeks.
“We really limited our amount of time on each song, but they ended up… I mean, I don’t know, it’s a better record honestly. We all feel it’s a better record, which says a lot about my production [laughing].
“It was so refreshing because I had really worked my butt off just to get myself versed enough and back into the swing of engineering and miking and recording stuff.
“So it was a pretty big effort for me to produce ‘Heartworms’, and then we went in to re-record, and everybody in the band they’re all proficient.
“You get really good people in the room, you just let them do what they do, and there’s ideas that you never would have had so everything gets more beautiful. So maybe once that comes out we might have to play some of those flipped versions.”
The Shins Shows
Sat 2 Dec - Fidelity Festival (Perth)Mon 4 Dec - Palais Theatre (Melbourne)
Tue 5 Dec - QPAC Concert Hall (Brisbane)
Fri 8 Dec - Enmore Theatre (Sydney)
Sat 9 Dec - Fairgrounds Festival (Berry, NSW)
