It was due to their success in the US that Pretty City landed their upcoming European tour.
“This guy, he’s actually Austrian but he lives in Portland in the US, heard our stuff, I think on college radio because we’re getting played a lot on college radio there, and what he does is he books tours for psych bands that he likes,” says guitarist and backup vocalist Johnny-Luis Moretti.
Of the upcoming tour, Morretti, the self-proclaimed foodie of the band, says he is eager to try foreign delicacies. “I film these little food blogs while we’re on tour, so I try and find interesting, different foods that I’ve not had before or that places are famous for. I’m excited to go to Europe and rate all the food there,” he says. “That and playing to new audiences. I’ve never been to Europe before so I’m keen to see how the audiences respond there.”
Pretty City have also been working on their new album which they hope to release at the beginning of 2018. Recording the album has been an arduous but ultimately rewarding process, according to Moretti. “We were at South By [Southwest] last year, we came home and we already had the album written so we went straight to the studio in June and recorded the whole thing start to finish in like a week,” he says.
“But then it took us months and months and months to get the mixes back from the engineer, and every time we got them back it just didn’t sound right and we couldn’t figure out what it was.
“The influences for that album were originally glam influences, old ‘70s influences like T-Rex and Ziggy Stardust and things like that, which seems a bit weird when you think about our sound which is sort of a shoegaze, grungy, psych sound,” says Moretti.
“We were moving that whole psych sound into a big stadium, bombastic, glam direction but it didn’t quite work out in the studio, it was hard to capture that on tape. In the end we ended up scrapping the whole album. I think we’ve kept about three or four of the songs, but essentially Hugh [Matthews] has written a whole bunch of new songs since then.
“So what we’re doing now is we’re taking that massive stadium sound and then we’re pushing it into a tiny little cage and presenting it that way. The music is like looking in on a wild tiger who’s in a cage and the cage is about to explode.
“We’re recording the new album by ourselves in our living rooms and stuff. The results are coming out much better,” says Moretti. “But there’s all these new songs that nobody’s ever heard of, so we want to start drip feeding people all these new songs.”
Aside from the obvious excitement that comes with releasing new music, Moretti speaks of his passion for creating the visual aspects of the new record. “I like making art, so I do all the merch for the band,” he says. “For Colorize, we did white vinyl and we made art prints that we put inside, stickers, and I think I also put a really high quality photo of the band as well. Not that I think anyone’s going to stick our photo on the wall, but it’s a cool thing that you can do with vinyl.
“I can imagine in 30 years time, someone trawling through record stores and picking that one up and it has a sticker on the front that says ‘includes art prints, stickers, band photo’ and someone justifying five dollars more for that then like, the normal ones,” says Moretti. “We’re always thinking of artwork and what we’re going to do, so we’re definitely going to do fun stuff like that [with the new record].”
