'It Changed Me': 17 Hours At A Famous Nightclub Stopped The Party For Northeast Party House

Calling a record Shelf Life – as Melbourne sextet Northeast Party House have with their third album – seems like it has to be a joke. Some riff on the forever youth-obsessed nature of pop, or the bleak future prospects for a band after a decade together, right? Turns out, it’s a title that carries real meaning for the outfit.

“[The name] felt poignant in a club setting, poignant in a dance setting, poignant in being in a band,” says vocalist Zach Hamilton-Reeves. “It wasn’t a tongue-in-cheek thing, it felt like it carried a weight. We’ve matured, and it feels like this certain time in our lives may’ve ended. That’s not something we’re lamenting, that’s just the way things are: things change.”

Hamilton-Reeves is about to turn 28, and most of his fellow bandmates – Mitch Ansell, Jack Shoe, Sean Kenihan, Oliver Packard, Malcolm Besley – are, he says, in the midst of “turning 30”. Which makes Northeast Party House, essentially, a band undergoing a collective Saturn Return. “It feels like a real time of change. In the past three years while we’ve been making this album, lots of stuff’s happened,” Hamilton-Reeves offers.

In turn, Shelf Life is an album on which the singer found himself sharing “more of [his] life”, being “more vulnerable than [he has] in the past.” While the music trends towards big, electronic, dancefloor-worthy jams, the lyrics detail relationship blues, break-ups, being lost, and losing your edge.

This starts with the title track. The jam finds Hamilton-Reeves recreating his experience during an all-nighter at Berlin’s notorious Berghain club. While distorted voices exhort the lyrical protagonist to “keep on dancing”, he has to push back. “I think I need some air/My knees are getting wobbly, my face is real sore/I feel like, 'Fuck this, it’s time,'” Hamilton-Reeves speak-sings. 

“We were there for 17 hours,” Hamilton-Reeves recounts, “but it’s more about the aftermath of what happened. The song talks about what happened there, which really messed me up, a little bit, for quite a long time. For, like, six months. It changed me from partying to not partying at all. That’s a change which is interesting when you’re in a ‘party band’.”

Since their beginnings in, um, Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs, Northeast Party House have been a party band; their rep forged not via their studio albums, 2014’s Any Given Weekend and 2016’s Dare, but by their boisterous live shows. Life within a party band hasn’t, however, been one long party.

“You can always have heavier times,” says Hamilton-Reeves. “The dynamics always go up and down. When you’re making art, working towards something, there’s always going to be doubts. And doubts lead to fears. And fears make different people feel different things. That sounds like such a broad statement, but what it means is that, when you have a group of people, they will react to the same situation in different ways.”

Having formed in 2010 as teenagers, the six members of Northeast Party House find themselves, now, as a band of essentially different people. “At the start it was more friendship-based,” Hamilton-Reeves offers. “But, over time, that’s changed, and you become more focused on the work you have to do, like it’s a job. It’s not all just us having a great time together. Of course, they’re not mutually exclusive. We still have heaps of fun, and there’s heaps of love for each other. But, like family, there has to be a lot of space for each other… It’s like any kind of relationship. You learn a lot from each other, and hopefully you can grow together. Because people do change.”

When working on Shelf Life, being in Northeast Party House went from being ‘like’ a job, for its members, to just an actual job. The band were hoping that their third album would be a ‘level up’ affair. So, they signed to Sony. They studied production and pop songwriting techniques via online primers from music schools and studio boffins. And, they paid themselves a wage to work on the record. “In that way, it was like a proper job, rather than doing it in out-of-work hours around other work,” Hamilton-Reeves says.

“It was very exciting to be able to pay ourselves. To finally be able to feel like, ‘Hey, we are musicians.’ It gave a real air of excitement and enthusiasm to it. You work so hard for so long to be able to get to a moment like that. Before that, we all had day jobs. I used to work at Nudie Jeans, retail. When I got rid of that, it was awesome. It was probably one of my best days ever, quitting. Three years later, not having to go to 'work' feels more normal. But it’s still awesome.”

This kind of financial independence was always something the band was striving for, even if it often went unspoken. It is, Hamilton-Reeves considers, a central belief for any band. “The goal is always ‘We want to be in band forever and we want making music to be our job,’ and everything you do is, in some ways, working towards that,” he says. The positive early feedback they received – winning an Unearthed competition to play Pyramid Rock in 2010, their earliest days, convinced the singer Northeast Party House “were gonna be rock stars” – meant that making music their career always felt tenable, not just in their “very naive” salad days, but as they’ve gone on, and grown up

This means that, ten years in, Northeast Party House are officially living the dream. The years have gone on, their lives have changed, members have grown up, and along the way this ‘party band’ has had a blast. “It’s been incredible,” Hamilton-Reeves says, sufficiently chuffed. “Being able to travel Australia with your friends, travel through Europe on tour, getting to play shows in front of thousands of people, having people sing back to you these words that you wrote in your bedroom at a show – it’s bizarre, and it’s the best.”