“This one has a physical release as well as a digital release, and that’s a first for us,” states Lahey. “I think we just wanted to do something a bit more serious, something with a tangible product at the end of it. We also have a B-side, This Time. That song was on our EP but it wasn’t quite what we wanted at the time. We always thought there was a really good song in there though so we really thought about it and gave it a makeover. Now it’s a song which we’re quite proud of.
“As for Paradise, we wrote that at the very end of last year. For the first time ever we recorded a demo before going in to the studio, which was a really helpful experience for us. Through that process we worked out that we really wanted to work with a good producer, so we contacted Adam Rhodes who has worked with The Cat Empire, Jackson Jackson, Angus and Julie Stone – all those guys. We really wanted someone who knew how to work with horns, so naturally when we knew he worked with The Cat Empire we thought ‘we’ll go for him’.
“Adam completely transformed the sound. He made it so much fatter and brighter, and he really helped us with something we struggled with which was capturing our live sound. This is pretty damn close. There’s always something more to work on, but that’s part of the fun.”
Asked to describe Animaux’s sound and approach to music, Lahey responds with a little bit of everything. “The most interesting tag we’ve been given was indie jazz. I’ve never heard that before, and I kind of liked it,” she says. “We’re self-proclaimed ‘pop-funk’, but when people ask we kind of say we’re a pop band with a horn section. I was talking to someone yesterday who asked me how I would describe indie so I started talking about unsigned bands and doing things off your own bat, but when I thought about it I decided maybe that’s not right as I wouldn’t call Animaux an indie band I don’t think, although that’s what we do. I don’t know, it’s hard.
“We got together as the majority of us were finishing Year 12 in high school. The seven of us used to play in a school band together and we didn’t want to stop playing after the majority of us graduated. We didn’t really know what would come out of it when we were 17, but when we spoke about it recently one of the boys was like, ‘I thought this was going to be a full on deep funk band’ and someone else thought it would be a jazz combo. It’s defied all our expectations really.
“There are so many ideas and influences, probably because we’re quite a big band with seven of us. It’s good though, you’re not sitting there in rehearsals worrying about not sounding enough like this or that or whatever. A lot of the attitudes and habits towards music from back in our high school days are still there too. Our band director taught us a lot about how to approach music – about being collaborative and being careful of becoming too competitive.”
Animaux are likely to have some highs ahead of them, but one in particular stands out so far. “It was great when we played the St. Kilda Festival just because we’re all from that area. We’d all been going since we were 12, even younger, and it was great to go back as a performer and be a part of it. Finally getting to play it was quite sentimental.”
BY JOSH FERGEUS
