The Sydney-based singer-songwriter has just released her sophomore album, Stop And Smell The Lightning.
An interview with Annie Hamilton doesn’t feel like an interview at all. It feels more like going to your favourite bar and catching up with an old friend over a cocktail or two, which weirdly enough might actually be a possibility given Hamilton and I share the same favourite bars.
“I love Jungle Bird,” she says with a cheeky smile, referring to the rum joint in Fremantle, Western Australia, the city where she recorded most of her new record.
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Dialling in from her house in Clovelly, the alt-pop singer-songwriter is far away from the expansive beaches of Fremantle. She’s hard at work, although it appears to be on something unrelated to music. She is, in fact, crafting a friend’s wedding dress.
“It’s a bit stressful,” Hamilton admits. “I’ve done six wedding outfits. After every one, I say I’m not going to do another, but then I do. It’s very enjoyable though.”
Plus, it’s probably good to get ahead on the progress, given her life will soon become a blissful rollercoaster. Preparing for the release of her sophomore album, Stop And Smell The Lightning, she’s the personification of excitement. Still reeling from the release of her single Slut Era, Hamilton mentions, “My dad wears Slut Era merch!”.
With a smile from ear to ear, she searches for the right words to explain her new album’s title. “Umm… I just love lightning,” she says.
“It’s a lyric from one of the songs. I came up with that line and then it stuck because it felt like a play on ‘stop and smell the roses’ but this chaotic, wild version. I also think of it as a reminder to be present and pause. Like, why aren’t we all freaking out about lightning? It’s insane. Huge beams of electricity shooting out from outer space into Earth. It’s totally random and most of us are just like, ‘that’s cool’.”
The record was written primarily in Fremantle, or ‘Freo’ as locals call it with Jake Webb of Methyl Ethyl.
In describing the process with Webb, Hamilton offered, “It was incredible. We had worked together before, but it was remote due to COVID-19. So when the borders eventually opened, I thought, ‘Imagine what we could do if we were in a room together’. So I did and it was exactly as I imagined and better. I just had so much fun making it.”
This fun is audible throughout the entire record. Utilising a variety of utensils and sounds such as bat sounds, Webb encouraged a ‘throw spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks’ approach.
“In Slut Era, all the percussion in that song is me smashing stuff with a hammer. Jake just gave me a bunch of tools – a hammer, a vacuum cleaner, an electric meat slicer, a metal bucket, a chain – all these weird tools, and I just did it.”
It even got to the point where one day Webb and Hamilton took to howling on the floor of the studio. “In DYNAMITE ●~*, we wanted to put all these sound effects on. We searched for a howling pack of dogs but then we just thought ‘Fuck it, let’s howl ourselves’. So we just began howling.”
Throughout the process, Hamilton eventually fell in love with Freo. “Every time I got on the plane it felt like I was blocking off reality and entering a magical bubble. I was totally removed from my everyday life, emails, the music industry and just going into this dreamland.”
After returning home to Sydney, Hamilton got to work on the specific aesthetic she wanted for the record. “Someone described it to me the other day as ‘chaos Barbie’. I wanted it to be surreal and a bit of magic realism. I’ve always had this image of me running around in a storm and lighting and chaos behind me, so that’s the cover.”
Soon, Hamilton will be embarking on a tour that will see her travel all around Australia and eventually to the UK. Still, she’s got quite a bit to do until then, including more promo, a single to release, a music video to shoot and a wedding dress to finish. It’s enough to make your head spin, so we’ll leave her to it.
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