SheOak have recently released In The Sun, their first music in four years which finds them now floating in dream pop shoegaze territory. Ahead of their single launch at Lulie Tavern on Friday August 28th, Xadi joins Tempo to fill us in about the track and the special connection to Charlie Needs Braces who will also be joining the bill.
Hello Xadi, Congratulations on the single In The Sun, which is the first new music for you in four years and leans heavily into dreampop and shoegaze territory. What have you been up to all this time and how does it feel to have it out?
Thanks so much! We recorded the beds of the album when I was 30 weeks pregnant in our home studio (being mine and Andy’s place). We did as much as we could after this, then we had our beautiful son Ochre.
It’s a juggle when your parenting, your sleep deprived for at least the first few years and you’re also navigating your day jobs.
We’ve been jumping into the studio whenever we can to finish the overdubs, it’s been a journey but it’s been nice to chip away at it so we can give the creative energies of the songs some space and really hone into how we want the songs to feel and sound overall.
It feels so good to have the first single out now, it feels like the right time. We’re all really proud of In The Sun and we had a lot of fun making the film clip.
The song is defined by reverb drenched guitar sounds and an expansive vocal delivery. Can you tell us more about the track?
Sure! Andy and I wrote this song together. He came up with the chords, with a more obscure (but awesome) tuning by flattening the top E and B strings of the guitar down half a tone. With the chords he came up with I found a melody over it and then wrote the lyrics. We wrote it on acoustic, but both imagined it would be quite a dreamy, shoe-gazey song. We then layered rhythm, several gliding rhythm guitar parts and then had Jules (SheOak’s lead guitarist) do his thing over all of that.
It is a newly inspired direction which sees you pushing into more psych and dreamy influences. Can you tell us about this shift and who the main influences are for your sound?
You could say with this new album we are quite influenced by nostalgic 90’s-2000s bands like Cranberries, Jeff Buckley, Slowdive, MBV, as well as more mid 2000’s bands like Real Estate and Deerhunter. We were reflecting on more local based bands we were listening to in our early twenties such as The Laurels, Morning Harvey, Black Springs, Grease Arrestor, it’s a pretty mixed bag of influences really, haha.
To coincide with the track, you have also created whimsical clip to with it, which you made (with final treatment from Brodie J Brummer) which is influenced by nostalgic late night RAGE videos. Tell us about the making of the clip and why RAGE is so important to you?
The making of this clip was very DIY. We had a pretty much no budget, so we came up with the story, dressed up as planets and the Sun and used our phones to shoot it on location (a reserve near Coburg) then pieced it all together in iMovie.
It was one of those classic Naarm days of seven seasons in one day, haha. One moment it was sunny and then next moment it would pour down with rain, but it all kind of worked really well with what we needed for each “scene” and mood of the story.
The wind would make the effect of my dress blowing look wicked and at the end of the day the sun came out just as we needed it for the end of the clip!
The dream pop kind of feel mixed with the silly humour of the clip and the final treatment made it feel pretty nostalgic and very 90’s. I think we had subconsciously been influenced by late night RAGE, probably from growing up watching it as kids in the 90’s/early 2000’s.
The single was recorded in Andy Lloyd-Russell’s (SheOak’s drummer/producer) studio in Heidelberg, with Brodie J Brummer (Flyying Colours) who was tasked with capturing the band live. Can you tell us about working with him and how he complemented what you do?
Brodie is one of our best friends (He and Andy play together in Flyying Colours so they work together a lot), so working with him is so chilled and comfortable. He’s such an incredible engineer and is very encouraging of any direction your creative juices take you, and you feel like you can be yourself in that space with him. His experience and musical sensibility really helped us form such a solid foundation for these songs.
I am wondering if you are currently building towards an album or EP release?
We sure are! We will be releasing our first full length album, with a release later this year. It’s been a long time coming for us but we’re super excited to release this new music, it feels like our strongest collection of songs and solidified by a really inspired new direction for us.
You are launching the single at Lulie Tavern on Friday 28th August, with support from Charlie Needs Braces. Can you tell us about your connection to the venue and the support?
We love the Lulie Tavern, and have seen (and played) some great gigs there. We thought the vibe would be very suited for us and this release. It’s a very fun, inclusive and social space.
I’m a huge fan of Charlie Needs Braces. I love how they bring their mobs culture to life through their music. It’s really important and purposeful work which I resonate with very much being a First Nations artist myself.
I am at the very beginning of my journey of reconnecting to my mob roots, so I feel very inspired by them, and I really enjoy their music, it’s so fun! Andy has also mixed them and loved them, so we were stoked to have them be able to play this release with us!
Finally, who are your favourite local Melbourne bands right now and who would you like to see interviewed for Tempo?
My favourite artists based in Naarm and who I would love to see interviewed on Tempo are Charlie needs Braces, Bumpy, Kee’ahn, Hannah Cameron, Leah Senior, Estelle Conley, Pollyman, Alice Skye, to name a few!
SheOak | Single Launch
Friday 28th August, with Charlie Needs Braces.
Free entry.
Lulie Tavern, 225 Johnston Street Abbotsford