Track By Track: The Harpoons detail their excellent sophomore album, Amaro

Header photo by Jeff Andersen Jnr.

Amongst the long list of great albums to arrive in our hands last week was a stellar one by Melbourne four-piece The Harpoons, who followed up their acclaimed 2014 debut Falling For You with an absolute ripper of a second album in Amaro. Combining their influences in R&B, electronic, pop and more, Amaro is a bit of a genre-bending release, with the quartet exploring every corner of their sound while also using the album to push forward and experiment with sounds absent from their debut. After a sensational, acclaim-filled 2017, Amaro paths the way for another big year for The Harpoons in 2018, who were kind enough to walk us through their expansive release and all the meanings underneath in a track-by-track walkthrough. Dive into the album below (or buy it HERE), with the track-by-track commentary underneath.

Pressure

This track puts the lustful female gaze to music, building in intensity and lyrical profusion until it breaks. Pressure drives our daily existence, in the air, the water, the wind, and the pressure that builds up between sexy people, of course. Inspired by the dark corners of sweaty but emptying dance floors, when you gravitate towards your crush and knowing that you are about to say something because your heart is pounding.

Do You Want My Love

Some people cannot take a subtle message. Instead, they need to be screamed at over a scorching dance beat to understand that you are into them. This is a homage to women who take control, women who own the night and own their desires.

Amaro

Scenes from a heartbreak. Loneliness and bitter alcohol. A song of mourning for what two people tried to put together and all the ways they let each other down. This song is also about that moment of acknowledgement when you realise it is time to move on, to finish your mourning.

Set Me Up To Fall

Sometimes you are ready for love and waiting for it to catch you. Other times it finds you when you are so over trying and you just want to focus on folding your laundry. Set Me Up To Fall is a lyrical telling of a moment when love materialises unexpectedly. This song comes from that place where you are humbled by how wrong your preconceptions about someone can be. How love and lovers and be completely different from your postcard ‘perfect’ person and how ultimately that is an excellent thing, and the most exciting part of love.

Be In Your Love

Sometimes no matter how much you love someone you can’t access their inner life and they can’t be in yours. Sometimes your admiration for someone can even be the thing that stops you from being able to truly be on the same page. Sometimes someone’s pedestal separates them from you forever. This is sort of a rolling mantra of goodbye, a song of loss and separation, and the realisation that reality and wanting don’t always overlap.

Girl

This is Bec’s salute to all of the beautiful women in her life. Written in a moment of deepest gratitude, this is a sensual love song for the friendships that help you to create your life, to dance till you are all sweaty and you let your hair down and you take your top off and scream out for life! This is a love song for women who support their women to be the best versions of themselves and remind them to always put themselves first.

Reassurance

The Harpoons spent a quarter of a year living in London, writing, recording, enjoying the fried chicken culture, the tiny basement clubs, janky jazz bars and the rewinds on the radio. This is our cute homage to UK garage, one of the deepest scenes of the naughties that went literally from broadcasting out of people’s garages on pirate radio in the UK to sweeping the entire world.

Reassurance is a song about adoring someone heaps and being shocked when the person you adore is down on themselves. It’s lying to yourself through hard times to make it to better ones and wanting nothing but to make someone feel reassured that they will get to go to those great times with you.

Through The Water

This pensive interlude is a short swim through some of the new sounds and ideas that influenced us when making Amaro. It’s a brief but atmospheric journey, offering the advice that if you just keep swimming, one day you’ll reach the shore.

How Many Nights

This is a positive breakup song, for those times when you are looking back and thinking what was I thinking?! A reflection on the type of relationship that has you unhealthily obsessing when you, in reality, know it’s totally bad news. You know it’s time to let it go, and you’re hopeful in time it won’t hurt, but sometimes your heart is not done with you long after you have given up on the idea. A song for when your heart lapses and you need some motivation to push through.

To Be Loved By You

You know when things just keep disconnecting no matter how hard you try to love someone? Do you lose each other in miscommunication and frustration? This song is all about that feeling. Why?

All I’ve Ever Done

This is Marty’s very personal and beautiful homage to Oz Rock circa 1992. A lamenting track that is a devotional to the person at the centre of your daily life, a tribute to the hard work and commitment it takes to be in this life together and to trust.

All I’ve ever done is about reconciling differences and deciding to forgive people even though it might seem like a bad move because, you know, people can be stupid. All squeezed into a song that sounds like a marriage proposal.

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