After their single Bridges attracted attention in early 2014, Broods’ debut LP Evergreen sent them off on a mammoth world tour. Along with sold out dates in Australia and New Zealand, they notched up North American tours with Ellie Goulding and Sam Smith and made multiple appearances on US network television. In the lead-up to their second LP, Conscious, Brood’s growing overseas success has prompted a permanent move to the States.
“We moved to West Hollywood. It’s a bit bigger than little old Nelson,” says Caleb. “It took me convincing Georgia. No one had to convince me. I’ve been wanting to do it for a good year or so. So I was waiting for her to be ready to do it – she is, so that’s fantastic.”
Out this weekend, Conscious is a very assertive record in terms of both production and song craft. There’s plenty of sweeping choruses, emphatic vocal melodies and instrumental hooks. Though, the eruptive choruses found in songs like Free and Are You Home are contrasted with the downcast tone of Worth the Fight and Bedroom Door.
“It’s a bit of a schizo album, but I guess that’s because it was written over two years,” Caleb says. “So there’s a lot of different inspirations that have come and gone. Depending on what kind of place you’re in at that time, [the songwriting] depends on that.”
The Nott siblings aren’t exactly kids, but they’re both still in their early 20s. It’s been two years of non-stop activity for the band – Evergreen was followed by18 months of touring, which led directly into the writing and recording of Conscious. These are important and typically mutable years in one’s self-development; a time in which you gain more conviction in your tastes and opinions. Looking back on Broods’ earlier recordings, Caleb can identify the whims of his younger self, but he feels no embarrassment.
“That’s always going to happen, but it doesn’t mean that I love those songs any less,” he says. “It was part of your life at that stage. All I really go back to is production type of things. But you can’t really go back and pick at your old songs, because that’s not going to do you any good, is it? You’d never release another song ever again.”
With the release of the Broods EP in January 2014, Broods quickly became aligned with pop music. Pop music tends to draw from all over the stylistic map, as exemplified by greats like The Beatles, David Bowie, Janet Jackson and Prince; contemporary pop stars Beyoncé, Rihanna and Kanye West; and indie pop acts Grimes, Chvrches and Tegan and Sara. It’s no different for Broods –Caleb and Georgia have noted Kanye, M.I.A., Marilyn Manson, Haim and Azealia Banks as influences on the album’s lead single Free – which is largely a result of the pair’s individual preferences.
“If you listen to what I listen to in the way of other artists and you listen to what Georgia listens to, you’d think, ‘How do they work together?’ ” Caleb says. “[Our tastes] are pretty different and as songwriters we’re completely different as well. I think that’s kind of how it works.
“But with the whole pop thing, it’s pretty weird. If you asked me four or five years ago if I was going to be writing pop music for a living I would’ve said, ‘Fuck off. I don’t listen to pop music. I don’t listen to mainstream radio.’ ”
One listen to Conscious is proof that he’s since done a creative one-eighty. “Once you meet other people in the industry and you start working on stuff and you start slowly going that way… I think I just didn’t have the respect that I have now for the pop industry and how hard it is to actually make good pop music and how interesting it is to make it,” Caleb says. “Now I’m just like a pop geek. I can’t really explain why I changed my mind. It just happened.”
Being a self-described pop geek doesn’t mean Caleb obsessively follows prominent pop music trends and uses them as a filter for his own ideas. “The stuff that I’m bringing in is not really coming from anywhere pop, really,” he says. “That’s the funny part. It just kind of ends up being pop naturally when we work together. It’s a weird combination where pop happens by combining two different ideas that aren’t really pop.
“[I was thinking about] the change in the album and how the sound’s changed. That’s the most terrifying thing for me – coming back and people thinking that we’ve over-popped it, which I don’t think we have.”
While this sounds like an exaggerated fear, it’s understandable given how much attention is now directed at Broods. Evergreen was a breakout success, converting fans from all corners of the globe, while the anticipation for Conscious blossomed with the announcement that Ella Yelich-O’Connor (AKA Lorde) co-wrote the album’s latest single, Heartlines.
“Making this second album, I think it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” Caleb says. “There was no expectations when we wrote Evergreen. You have those expectations hanging over you a little bit, you can’t really run away from that, but that first album did better than we ever thought it could. So it’s like, ‘How can we top it? Are people going to react in the way that we hope they are?’ That’s why it’s terrifying.”
On the cusp of the album’s release, the band’s worries haven’t subsided. However, Caleb says the high stakes didn’t interfere with the songwriting process. In fact, they might even have energised it.
“I think [fear] can be a useful creative tool. The second album, every decision you make, you take in a lot more than you did when you wrote the first album. We just wrote music [for Evergreen], but then after touring for so long and being in the industry for a wee while you think about other things that you wouldn’t have thought about when we wrote Evergreen. So that was why we decided to call it Conscious, because there was a lot more calculated decisions in writing it.”
Calculated decision-making implies the pursuit of certain goals, which makes you wonder what motives were arbitrating the Notts’ actions. “I think the only goal we brought to it was to write something better – to write something that felt like a development. If you’re writing music, you could write the same sort of stuff every time, but that’s no fun for anyone. So I guess the goal was to make an album that felt like a development from not just our side but from our fans’ side and everyone else.”
Much like Evergreen, Conscious was developed alongside producer and co-writer Joel Little (Lorde, Daniel Johns, Jarryd James); plus additional production from Alex Hope (Troye Sivan) and Captain Cuts (Halsey, Tove Lo), and a vocal appearance from Tove Lo. In terms of the band’s internal dynamic, one could assume Caleb and Georgia’s roles are clearly defined. Georgia is the vocalist and lyricist, while Caleb takes charge of the instrumentation and arrangements. But while this is broadly how it works, their roles are flexible.
“Georgia has a say in production and instrumentation – she had a lot of input in instrumentation – and I have some input in some of the lyric writing,” Caleb says. “It was like that in terms of who did what on the first album, but you develop as an artist yourself, and as a team that line starts to blur a little bit.”
Meanwhile, there’s never any trepidation about stepping on each other’s toes. “When you’re a brother and sister it’s pretty easy. You can be pretty blunt. You can say what’s on your mind pretty easily. It probably could be [an obstacle], but it never is because we usually agree on whatever the other person says.”
