Soul Survivors

"We haven't used the term 'milk bar',” is how HTRK's Jonnine Standish responds to the suggestion that their music is not necessarily of Melbourne, or Australia, but she definitely gets the sentiment. For the first time in some years Standish is settled in Melbourne and her HTRK other half, Nigel Yang, is living in Sydney. In fact, their latest album, Psychic 9-5 Club, will be the first album the band have released while living in Australia, having spent large chunks of the last decade living in Berlin and London.

“It's kind of relaxing, actually,” says Standish of the concept of finally releasing an album at home. “It might have something to do with the fact that we're more relaxed about releasing albums these days. We've had pretty humorous and also tragic experiences with releasing albums in the past, so this one's really quite casual.”

Psychic 9-5 Club will be HTRK's first release not seriously delayed by industry business or affected by enormous tragedy. And following the death of their bandmate Sean Stewart in 2010, three-quarters of the way through production of their previous LP, the supreme Work (Work, Work), it's also their first LP release as a duo. “The only reason HTRK continues is in Sean's memory because he had this music that we wanted people to hear,” says Standish. “We wanted to dedicate [Work (Work, Work)] to him and his memory and by doing that [Yang and I] had a relationship where we could work together as a duo.”

It's a beautiful thing to acknowledge that HTRK's continued existence came down to their dedication to the memory of their friend. And Work (Work, Work), as a tribute to this, has exceptional contrast of darkness and light. According to Yang, the gloomier moments were not necessarily penned in reaction to their grief. In fact, he says, they found great freedom in continuing the project in Stewart's memory. “Working on Work (Work, Work), even though you might think that Sean dying could've made us really depressed, to me there was an element of, like, some sort of opening of energy or something,” he says. “I think that had a lot to do with how songs flow and the parts we recorded on top of songs that we were working on with Sean – we transformed a lot of them and I think a lot of melodies and transformational things musically happened after he passed away. It definitely wasn't like [when] he passed away we wrote the depressive songs.”

“Also, Sean had become like a muse in a way,” continues Standish. “We reread every email over all the years that he'd ever written to us. With every little snippet of music that he'd made, we collected it. We were almost worshipping his memory in a way, and that felt nice, it was a nice part of grieving. It was like a luxury that we could be close to him through sound...”

Yang and Standish converged in New Mexico, USA for the recording of some of the Psychic 9-5 Club material. The initial reason for this particular locale was to make use of the facilities at Blazer Sound Studios with producer Nathan Corbin, but the duo soon found a strong affinity with the place, and this will be felt on the album. “We had this strange little room in this valley that had no showers, no internet, no telephone lines,” says Yang. “[Corbin] had a really good analogue studio there that we recorded a few songs in.”

“The landscape instantly felt really spiritual for us,” says Standish. “It was the sparseness of the desert, which [Corbin had told them] is almost like a meditation for death, amongst the locals. It's a positive thing and [allows] you to let go of all grief. Because everything's so dry, everything's colourless, it's really crazy for the mind. It was super relaxing most of the time... I was just in awe of the landscape, it was crazy. That might filter into the feel of some of the [new] songs, especially Blue Sunshine.”

This concept of place creeping into art is often too complex to pinpoint. You could argue that HTRK's undefinable musical neighbourhood is very much wrapped up in the band's absence from home turf – that their internationalism of sound is born of proximity or distance. They've captured a beautiful sense of leg room on the aforementioned song, Blue Sunshine, and Yang and Standish agree they're becoming more aware of how their surroundings affect their art.

“This time I've been more conscious of my sense of place,” says Yang. “Because we wrote [Psychic 9-5 Club] and recorded it in so many places that might not come across that clearly but New Mexico definitely had an effect because that was where we went to first. Then we came back to Australia and wrote more stuff... New Mexico was always in our minds, I think, even on a subconscious level, just because of how awesome that place is. And that made us think a lot about Australia... It was way more a conscious thing, the sense of place, with some songs in particular.”