“He has a thing about people seeing his legs,” Pressure explains. “There was a gig where they didn’t have any kind of cover in front of the decks, and between every song some girl in the front kept screaming out something about his legs. You couldn’t work out what she was saying.
“But he wasn’t the same after that,” Suffa finishes, and everyone laughs, even Debris, who it must be said really is staring down through the table at his knees kind of sadly.”
It’s been said countless times that hip hop is a kind of contemporary poetry, and even the Hoods see an element of truth to this. “I think everyone wants to tell their story,” Pressure says. Though each bandmate is quick to run with a joke, it is Pressure who most often settles back and waits for the laughter to die down before laying out a straight answer. “I’ve always said that hip hop is like poetry but without the pretentiousness. It’s like ballsy poetry –”
“Without the ambiguity,” Debris cuts in, and they all agree.
“I think one of the things that initially drew me towards it as well was the rawness,” Pressure continues. “It wasn’t refined, especially in the late ’80s, early ’90s. It was raw; just people spilling out their hearts, saying their version of how they saw the world.”
“Or not saying anything at all. Just saying ignorant shit, which I love as well,” Suffa laughs. “I grew up along that ignorant route.”
It doesn’t hurt that not only did Suffa, Pressure and Debris grow up when the big international artists were first gaining notoriety, they each came from musical families who supported their early forays into hip hop. I remember playing Gangsta’s Paradise for my own family when that was actually an edgy thing to do, and the gentlest response was my old man’s assertion that he makes better sounds on the toilet. Suffa laughs.
“My dad’s a big jazz and blues collector,” he says. “My mum was a music teacher. A total musical family, so there was no rejection. By the way, time for a side note. Coolio’s bringing out his new album through PornHub. Every song is going to be a song on PornHub.”
Instantly, conversation becomes incomprehensible as everyone starts talking at once about both how bizarre and awesome the move is.
“No more Spotify. Everything just comes through porn!”
“Masturbate to my new record!”
“Each CD comes with its own tube of lube!”
As marketing angles go, they could do a whole lot worse. The expectation for Hilltop Hoods’ new album has hit insane levels ever since last year’s delay, and the pressure for them to release has been steadily building. Suffa shakes his head.
“I’ve never been asked so many times, ‘When is the due date for an album?’ All because we were supposed to be back last year, and so now everyone’s like, ‘There’s something wrong.’”
“When you go away for two years after you’ve been producing for the last decade,” says Pressure, “a lot of people inside the hip hop industry in particular are watching closely to see when we’re coming back. Or whether we’re coming back at all.”
“The record is 12 tracks,” Suffa says, “but in that are the two or three hundred beats that are discarded; there are all the ideas that you follow that just fail. You know what I mean? People are like, ‘Man, you took four years to put out 12 songs?’ And it’s like, ‘That’s not how it works!’ One song, Cosby Sweater, came together over two weeks, and that was a really simple song. Throw some drums over it, a bassline. We wrote that one really quickly, found the beat, knocked it out. But others can stretch on. You program these complicated drums; it gets really involved. Sometimes it can actually seem pretty overwhelming. When you see over a hundred tracks, you’re like, ‘Holy shit. Where do we even start?’”
“And you could really be mixing that for the rest of your life trying to get the right sound,” Debris adds. “There comes a point where you just have to abandon it. A point where you’d probably start going backwards if you kept on trying to fix it.”
Now that the album is here, they all seem rather at ease with how it has taken shape and what the initial response has been. Although it’s the fans’ reactions they really care about, it is the industry itself that has put the greatest expectation on how – or if – Walking Under Stars will succeed.
“It’s the media who tend to be the ones mostly asking those questions,” Pressure muses. “I don’t know if they actually have any expectations about the album, but they sure ask those questions a lot.”
“Holding it up and comparing to the last album,” Suffa says resignedly. “And the hip hop community is fucking full of critics.”
At this, they all nod and sigh. It makes me wonder if this is also true of the fans. After all, Hilltop Hoods have been around for 20 years now, and with the evolution of their music it’s almost inevitable to have lost fans who are only about how they sounded in the days of A Matter of Time and Back Once Again.
“When you’re new, people just accept you for who you are,” Debris says. “When you’ve been around for ten years releasing records, suddenly people place expectations on you that you never put on yourself.”
“If you change too much you piss them off,” Pressure agrees. “If you don’t change enough you get bored.”
I take it that means there’s little hope of seeing the Hoods drop their long-awaited country album anytime soon. Though as Pressure is quick to point out, the group has been branching into different genres for years now.
“I think because we’re predominantly sample-based music, we kind of borrow from so many different genres that I don’t personally feel the need to go out and make some other kind of album,” he says.
Suffa nods sagely and throws up his hands.
“And don’t forget, none of us have singing voices or can actually play an instrument. So there’s that.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
