Everything’s looking peachy now for pop siblings Broods. Ready to release their third album, a follow up from the 2014 debut, ‘Evergreen’ and the 2016 ‘Conscious’, ‘Don’t Feed The Pop Monster’ while appearing as a warning sign, serves as a reminder for Georgia and Caleb Notts to be true to their unique sound.
“I think in the past we’ve found ourselves writing for the sake of writing a pop song or trying to write for a specific audience or radio station or genre or whatever,” Georgia says. “I think we put boundaries on ourselves and limited ourselves because we felt like we had to feed the industry where we knew exactly what would work and we knew exactly what we could do to make the label happy but then we released the album [Conscious] and we got dropped anyway.”
The New Zealand duo spent much of their 2018 brooding over their breakup with their US label, Capitol Records, channelling their feelings of uncertainty and trying to find their feet into their writing while revisiting their roots. Ironically, through the process they seem to have landed firmly.
“That’s the cool part, we weren’t sure what the hell we were doing so we were writing about not being sure what the hell we were doing and made an album!” laughs Georgia.
“I feel at the beginning we had something special that for some reason people liked us and wanted to listen to it but you get kind of paranoid about staying part of the industry and feel like you have to compromise yourself to be part of it and kind of pay your dues, but at the same time we have to play these songs that we’ve written once they’re out so we may as well make some stuff that we want to listen to.”
Audiences have already received a sneak peek into the upcoming 12 track release with ‘Peach’ and ‘Everything Goes Wow’ taking the Aussie shores by storm. The infectious energy flows through with tantalising hooks and a realness that we haven’t experienced from Broods.
“We were going back to a lot of music we were inspired by in high school. We were listening to a lot of like Gorillaz and artists that we liked because they did something different, not because they wrote really good pop songs and I think just listening to that music again after a while of being stuck in a mainstream pop loop, we just sort of broke open some kind of can and all of this shit came out,” she laughs. “We were really brutally honest with our lyrics and what we wanted to sing about. There’s no love songs on the album because we didn’t feel like it was a relevant thing to us at the time and what we were going through was huge growth spurts and being dropped by a label and trying to hold our own for a while and that fear of never being able to do it again- we were going through a lot of internal turmoil.”
Moving into Don’t Feed The Pop Monster, the Nott siblings, now signed to Neon Gold Records, recruited long-time producer and friend, Joel Little, and also enlisted producers like Tommy English, along with a solid team of supporters to keep the cogs turning.
“People that are on your side for the right reasons because there’s all of the bullshit where people get excited when thing are going great for you but disappear when they’re not and it’s like… to have people that genuinely give a shit on your good days and your bad days and understand what it’s like to be a part of this world that you’re in, it’s just…priceless!”
Broods ‘Don’t Feed the Pop Machine’ is out Friday, 1 February 2019
Written by Tammy Walters
