STACK Issue 151 May 2017

68 / 92

06 MAY 2017
INTERVIEW
continued
visit MUSIC NEWS
AMY
SHARK
Words Alesha Kolbe
TOURING
02/05 - 20/05
We caught up with Amy at
Sony’s HQ in Melbourne,
and chatted with the humble
Queenslander about finding her
sound, the Hottest 100, and the
contemplative clip for Weekends.
percussion, and I just went ‘This is working’,”
she smiles. “We did it again with another song
which had a lot more electronic drops in it, and
I just ended up feeling really good about it. I
thought I had a really cool sound. I’m glad we
eventually got there.”
Many were introduced to Shark just prior to
this year’s Triple J Hottest 100, in which she was
the surprise #2 entry with her beloved hit Adore.
Understandably, the next couple of days were
busy waters.
“[There] was a lot of talking about [the
single],” Shark says. “It was hard because I think,
even for me, it hadn’t quite registered. Did that
actually even happen?” And she’s still reeling, it
seems. “The Hottest 100 is another thing that
I’ve grown up listening to; it’s always been a day
when you sit around with your mates and put it
on. It was never even an idea that I floated that
I might feature on it one day. Everything sort of
escalated very quickly after that.”
Shark’s latest single, Weekends, boasts a
clip evoking the adolescence of many of
us: stuck behind the counter of a retail
job, waiting for payday. According to
the singer, she wanted to take the clip
in a completely different direction to
people’s expectations. “I’m sure people
thought it was going to be champagne
popping, but I really didn’t want
that,” she says. “The whole thing
about Weekends is that it’s
reminiscing on times when
you did have that part-time
job where you’re just stuck
in, almost detention, with all these
people you just don’t want to be
around, daydreaming about where
you’d rather be and who you’d
rather be with. I watched things
like The Breakfast Club and Empire
Records and I just really wanted
to include people you could relate
to. We were all absolutely useless
Whether you’ve been aware of her
circling or not, Amy Shark has
been kickin’ it in the music scene for
a couple of years now – but it’s only
recently that she’s released a little
more music. If you ask her, she blames
herself for being lazy, and not having
properly developed her sound.
“I probably didn’t put the effort
into the production – it’s such a big
thing, and I know that now,” reflects
the blossoming artist. “For so long I
just thought I would write acoustic songs and
I [didn’t] necessarily need to pour that much
money into [the production]. I wanted to find
something that would complement my voice and
my writing – putting acoustically-written songs
with these big hip hop beats behind them just
doesn’t work, or even make sense. No one’s
gonna buy into that. With one of my first songs, I
got to work with a guy who was really great with
at our jobs, and we were obviously all forced into
this one place together, only on weekends.”
Shark’s new EP Night Thinker features Adore,
Weekends, and a few other tracks that are yet
to be released. “I write a lot at night – I’m a
bit nocturnal,” explains Shark of the EP’s title.
“That’s when I’m usually at my peak and when I
have the most time to myself. It’s been like that
since I was quite young. I would always have a
pen and paper next to my bed, and I would just
come up with these single words – the worst
part was it would always be just before I was
about to fall asleep. In the end, the name just
made sense.”
Night
Thinker EP
by Amy Shark
is out now via
Sony.
(Sandy) ALEX G
The visceral offspring of Elliott Smith, Ariel Pink and Car Seat Headrest’s
Will Toledo has returned with an album even more diabolically alluring
than his last (2015’s Beach Music). Alex G has undergone a slight moniker
amendment to include the parenthesed prefix ‘Sandy’, and with it has come
some monster ideas on new album Rocket: violins saw, synths thump like a
beast at the door, and guitar details peer up through the chaos. The plonking
piano in Horse sounds like a truck dumping a mass of lollipops onto your
head, and there's a giant python of synth bass curling around Brick, during
which Alex repeatedly shouts “I know that you’re lying." But the sun comes
out, and when it does its warmth is amazing. This is a fascinating effort from
the fearless Philadelphian artist. ZKR
Rocket by
Alex G is out
May 19 via
Domino.