Crooked Colours have been a fixture of Australian dance music for over a decade, so it's a real shift to see Philip Slabber step out solo on new album Dirt Road Gold.
Sitting down with Crooked Colours’ Slabber back in May, my first question is obvious: what actually changes when it’s just you?
“It was definitely a little more freeing,” he says.
“At the beginning I approached it exactly how we did the first three. But about halfway through it got to a point where there was no sounding board.
“That’s when Sweat It Out stepped in, lining me up with sessions and co-writes. We never used to work with other people really. Had a lot of help on this album.”
Crooked Colours
- When: October 24
- Where: Northcote Theatre
- Tickets here
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That’s a bigger admission than it sounds. For years, bringing in outside collaborators simply wasn’t on the table.
“There was a weird mentality of if we’re going to do it, it has to be our stuff,” he tells me. “Doing that for a long time, you get stuck in your own mechanisms.”
I ask what it was like letting that go, working with names like Presets frontman Julian Hamilton, Georgi Kay, Xavier Dunn.
“The biggest roadblock is one or two elements working well, but there’s a 20 per cent missing,” he explains. “It’s easy to sit on something for so long it stops being exciting to you, so getting other influences is the difference between a demo and a finished product.”
Slabber has spoken about wanting this record to feel honest to where he’s at right now, while staying connected to Crooked Colours DNA; I wondered how he went about protecting it through this evolution.
“Being conscious of trying to keep it in one lane can be a bad thing,” he says.
“The way I write or produce, or the sound of my voice, automatically gives it a flavour of Crooked Colours. Regardless of what I do, it will sound adjacent to CC.”
So where is he at right now, and how does the album reflect that?
“It’s changed in terms of trying to sound a certain way instead of simply trying to be creative,” he says.
“We were chasing a sound we thought was cool. Now I’ve been doing it long enough to have a toolset, to go this is what I want it to sound like. Lyrically too, speaking from the heart more, instead of writing something with a brief.”
Lead single Oxford, he tells me, was the key that unlocked the whole record, tied to a trip back through Crooked Colours’ earliest Sydney days.
“Post COVID, and the band separating, I found myself at a bit of a crossroads,” he says.
“I’d fallen out of love with the process, started getting repetitive. Made me realise to stop overthinking it and find the things you love, rather than having expectations.”
When I ask what the version of him who started Crooked Colours would make of this record, he laughs before answering.
“Every time you release music, within six months you look back and go, that’s not that good. Which is a good thing, because if you think it’s as good, you haven’t become any better. I’d assume he’d be pretty stoked with the level of production and writing.”
The album covers a lot of ground sonically, from euphoric builds to electric stabs and more intricate moments, I want to know how he holds it all together under one vision.
“Some songs will start with one idea that dictates where it ends up,” he says. “There’s times I’ll have a demo that’s slower and try to turn it uplifting and dancey, and it almost never works.
“You have to let it be what it wants to be from the start, not rush it.”
Nowhere is that more obvious than on the title track, easily the record’s biggest curveball. What pushed him out of his comfort zone?
“It’s something I wouldn’t normally ever make,” he says. “It started as a creative challenge, asking myself what it would sound like if I wrote a country song.
“We ended up with this vocal that was kind of cool, and someone suggested I turn it into a house song.”
Guitar plucks and a train rhythm snare collide with a four on the floor pulse, and somehow it works.
The last thing on Slabber’s mind way back in May was how to take it on the road without a band beside him. “That’s a tough one at the moment,” he admits.
“I’m working hard to turn it into something I’m proud of. Figuring out the balance between performance and enjoyment, and building it around the moments that are fun for me and the audience.”
Catch Crooked Colours at Northcote Theatre on 24 October. Tickets on sale now.
