The process for Life Death Time Eternal took Tuka far less time than usual. “I really only had a window of time to do this solo album while I was touring with Thundas,” he says. “It was a really intense, busy time and I didn’t see a lot of people. I was either in front of heaps of people performing or I was with myself or one other producer in a room going ham on beats whenever I had free time. It was a great experience. I came out of [Thundamentals’ album] So We Can Remember with so much energy coming through me; I didn’t stop writing. Two days after I finished, I started writing again. I felt like I shouldn’t stop, and I’m glad I didn’t, now this is done.”
The wealth of creative inspiration has caused the balance between Tuckerman’s two projects to shift. “I’ve been going pretty much solo album, Thundas album, solo album, Thundas album for the last couple of years,” he says. “Usually there is solid time off in between. But that last Thundas record really had a lot of activity happening, and to be honest, we want to pretty much put another record out as soon as possible anyway.”
Despite the shortened break peroid, the next Thundamentals record is likely to deviate from 2014’s So We Can Remember. “The big reason I do the solo stuff is that I go away and test myself, so when we get back to Thundas I can bring more tools to the table,” says Tuckerman. “Usually I produce a lot of [the solo work] myself, but this time I didn’t have the time to produce the music, so I wrote it in my head and went to producers and started from scratch. Usually in hip hop you get a beat or a sample which starts it, and that’s the initial idea of the song, but I kind of didn’t have the time, and I wanted to approach it [from] a songwriting perspective. So I think of the song in my head first, find the initial idea off my own back, rather than starting with a sample or getting a beat off a producer.”
Thematically, Life Death Time Eternal represents something of an epiphany for Tuckerman. “I kind of loosely based the album around the idea of duality, kind of around a thought I had,” he says. “Within every song there’s a positive and negative that I’m talking about. It’s quite ironic, that positive and negative, because the epiphany I had to start writing the album is from how that Thundamentals song Smiles Don’t Lie went. I was thinking about how if I hadn’t had this heartbreaking relationship that had made me write that song – that’s one of Thundamentals’ most famous songs – I wouldn’t have been able to fulfil a lot of life goals in my career.
“From that failure I got a success,” he continues. “I was just thinking about the duality of that and how humans have really complex emotions, and there’s grey space between that success and failure, love and hate. I started researching duality and psychology within emotional standpoints and I found it fascinating, so when I approached the songs I took the thought that it’s not necessarily ironic that we have these opposing emotions – it’s just a complex system.”
BY THOMAS BRAND
