“It’s weird to think that’s a time that is relatively recent as well as feeling like a really long time ago. Still, that’s always the way that it is with these sorts of things. We knew that we wanted to put a lot of work into these songs – especially because our first EP felt really thrown together with whatever we had lying around. We were writing and demoing for about the first six months of last year, and we went through about 15 different songs before we settled on these five.”
Having decided on the songs that would make up Untethered, Halcyon Drive’s next plan of action was to head into the woods. With producer Steven Schram – who has worked with the likes of Paul Kelly, San Cisco and The Cat Empire – the band ventured out to the Otway National Park, some 160 kilometres away from the Melbourne CBD.
“We ended up shacking up in this mudbrick house out of the way,” says Oechsle. “It ended up working so well, I think we’re going to try and do that for every recording project that we have. It’s so awesome being able to go to bed and wake up surrounded by your instruments. The only drawback was having to forcibly remove yourself from the process from time to time – we had to make sure we stepped away to go eat dinner or something, just so we weren’t too engrossed in the recording.”
Oechsle also points out that despite being out in the bush, they couldn’t escape civilisation entirely. “I think we were there for a few days before we realised there were other people nearby,” he says with a laugh. “There was Max [Pamieta], just smashing away at his drums, completely unaware we were probably ruining everyone else’s getaway.”
From patched-in synthesizer and beats to raw guitar howls, Halcyon Drive’s sound isn’t uniformly dedicated to any singular genre mould. According to Oechsle, that’s entirely intentional. “I listen to everything – classic pop, more contemporary experimental music, everything that’s going on,” he says. “Max and Basil [bass/synth] play together in a mathcore band, so that takes up a lot of their musical interests, too. We’re definitely not set in our ways of only liking the kind of music that we make. I was over at Max’s house the other day, and he was showing me this really fast, brutal riff that his other band was working on. I have no idea if that slips into what we do together or not, but it’s definitely a part of it.”
This week will see the band heading out on a national tour in support of Untethered. For many, it will be their first chance to see the band perform since a string of breakthrough shows at the end of 2015, in which they opened for iconic Danish rock band Mew.
“One of our management team is a huge fan,” says Oechsle. “He was pushing for us to play those shows from the very second they were announced. They were new to us, but we started listening to heaps of them in the tour van. They’re a really unique band with a really interesting live show – right up my alley. Those shows ended up being pretty great for all of us.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
