“That first album (2011’s Escapades) was about three years worth of songs from when we first started writing together,” he says.”It was a bit of a compilation of different ideas from different points, whereas this time we sat down within a year and set ourselves the task of writing these songs and recording them, it’s a lot more of a complete body of work this time around.”
The cohesive and refined pop sensibilities Hungry Kids Of Hungary displayed on Escapades clearly made an impression on listeners. However, to the band it jumped all over the place, thematically and stylistically. With a renewed focus, they set their sights on making an album more representative of the band. “We approached it on those terms, so all these songs were going to exist together on a record and had to work with each other in some way,” he says.
As the project developed, McGrath and his fellow chief songwriter Kane Mazlin found themselves on the same wavelength, despite writing and recording separately in different locations.
“It’s really funny how it turned out, because when Kane wrote his first song, Sharpshooter, I got it and thought that he was writing really similar stuff to what I was working on at the time,” he says. “It was a weird anomaly that we started gravitating closer to the same sort of ideas.”
While their individual writing process remained the same for the majority of You’re A Shadow, McGrath and Mazlin finally sat down to write their first song together – upcoming single When Yesterday’s Gone. As far as the album’s tone and creative direction, the songwriting duo and their bandmates Ben Dalton (bass) and Ryan Strathie (drums) remained on the same page, with little thought given to outside forces. “It was more about what we reacted to and we’re pretty good at self-editing when we’re working on songs,” he says.
Going through a musical growth spurt, the foursome ended up cutting 30 songs down to the current 11. “There wasn’t much arguing to be done about that, we were very much in agreement with what we liked and what we felt was working and what we knew wasn’t worth pursuing,” he says.
One listen to You’re A Shadow, particularly in comparison to earlier work such as their 2009 self-titled EP, and it’s clear that this is the band’s biggest, boldest work to date. Admittedly taking a more “considered” approach to the album’s production sound, they had the chance to work with production god Wayne Connolly, who has helmed albums for everyone from The Veronicas to Powderfinger. After playing their tunes for several producers they soon realised Connolly was the logical choice for where they were going. “He became sort of our guru when we were recording and he understood the kind of record we wanted to make. We couldn’t have done it without his know-how,” he says.
Despite a string of recent small performances, their upcoming 17-date national tour will be the first time all of the material from You’re A Shadow will be performed for a live audience, after a year of solid recording. “We’ve been dying to bring these songs to the stage and cull a few of the old ones as well, it feels good to be playing new stuff again,” he says with a triumphant chuckle. “We’ve had a bit of a wait between the record being done and being able to release it, but it still feels new and fresh to us, because we’ve held off on playing so many of the new songs.”
The waiting game between recording the album and being able to perform it live has had a motivational benefit for a band used to playing a similar set list for the past couple of years. “With the first album, we played every song on that record at least once before we took it to the studio, whereas most of these songs have only existed on a demo or in a rehearsal space but have never been played on stage before,” he says.
Ready to get the new material out there, the challenge of feeling out the tunes in a live setting has made the Hungry Kids even hungrier. “When you finally get to that point where you’ve got to translate them from record to the live show, it is like piecing together this puzzle, saying, ‘What can we do here? How can we recreate this? How can we make it this big during this part’?” he says. “You don’t have the benefit of being in a studio and being able to finely tune the dynamics. You’ve gotta do that organically,” he says.
Slowly but surely becoming veterans of the live music circuit, McGrath and co. are excited to play with the dynamics of their sonically large new album. “With our songs there’s always been a bit of a shift that happens between on record and live, we rock them up a bit live and play them a bit faster and louder,” he says. “It’ll be interesting to see how some of the down-tempo songs go.”
BY ANDREW ‘HAZARD’ HICKEY
