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MUSIC
amazing experiences,
and to take that
for granted seems
ludicrous because so
many people in the
world work hard [and
they don’t] even have
a roof over their head,”
Tuka says. “I feel very
blessed.”
Understandable, but
that doesn’t mean an artist
has to bring that gratitude into the
actual content or mission of their music.
It’s the difference between blowing a kiss
to the crowd, and connecting with your
listeners’ concerns and desires. Being
authentic in expressing those messages is
paramount too. Tuka explains the figurative
lectern like this: “We channel a particular
type of collective consciousness, [wherein
we] honour awareness and critical thinking
because we are talking about what’s
happening in society; we try to think of
things and feel things that are worth listening
to. I believe that I’m kind of a victim of the
past, and I use time and space as tools to
activate ideas that I get – the idea might
not necessarily be mine. I’m just a vessel
expressing it. For instance,
Think About It
is about loneliness. Everyone experiences
it, and when they’re depressed they think
no one else understands who they are. The
irony is that everyone feels like that. Well,
why would I make this [track speak] to a
couple of people when everyone is feeling
like that? We wanted to spread it as far and
wide as we could. Some people are going
to call that a pop song. And, you know, it is.
But we wanted to honour the idea and tell as
many people as we could in a broad stroke
that you’re not alone, you’re just by yourself.
“It’s like a collage. All these ideas start
collaging and channelling themselves. You
start sculpting a theme. Then we noticed
that, wow, we’re just talking to people
in our lives and we’re commenting on
conversations that we’ve had in our lives. We
still left people out; we could go on forever.”
Tracks with vehement social messages
like the gender equality-driven
Ignorance Is
Bliss
– “Male, straight, white privilege”, “Are
you too insecure to listen to the inconvenient
truth?”, “One day we’re gonna get it right” –
flank wonderful backing instrumentals, like
the unhurried bell synths in stand-out
Milk
& Honey
, or the menacing glockenspiel in
Open Letter
, or the weirdly propulsive swing
of
De Ja Vu
. The latter’s feel is created by
Everyone We Know
’
s
abstract cover art is a
little bit MJ’s
Dangerous
,
drawing widely from the
album’s lyrics and themes.
There’s Sally-E, the girl
who can’t dance with her
Metropolis
-looking head; a
zombified man who looks
like an extra from
They
Live!
on the left; the scales
marked with ’21 grams’
in the foreground; and a
girl wearing her Reebok
pumps in the front-right. It’s
the work of creative Ben
Furnell, whom Thundas
have collaborated with for
almost every past project.
“We told him we wanted
a character for every song, [but] we wanted to add a depth of personality, too,” Tuka
says. “We wanted to make it a bit magical, a bit surreal: we love psychedelic imagery
on records.” An exhibition curated by Furnell and featuring a conceptual collection
of the album’s artwork is going on tour early this month, through Melbourne, Fortitude
Valley, Chippendale, Adelaide and Perth. Check
Thundamentals.com.aufor details.
the deliberate lagging-back
and odd timing of Tuka
and fellow MC Jeswon’s
voices, and slightly
wonky snare beats
from producers Morgs
and Poncho. “In hip hop,
snares are so important,
their placement,” Tuka says.
“You can really ruin a track by
making it feel square, and putting
[the snare] right on [the beat]. It was
kind of one of those Frankenstein things
we’d written – technical raps, super chilled
choruses, and trying to find a happy medium
where everything can fit.”
Even on the album’s biggest collab, that
fit was fortuitous. The beautifully triumphant
and poignant closer
21 Grams
features
Aussie hip hop royalty Hilltop Hoods; Tuka
was enormously impressed with the very
I use time and
space to activate
ideas that I get...
I'm just a vessel
apt verses the Hoods wrote without having
had a lot of contextual info. “Things got
complicated because [Hoods MC] Suffa had
a kid, so in the final dying hours we sent
them a bunch of beats,” Tuka says. “We were
pretty much, ‘We’re creatively exhausted,
do you guys want to make a start on this?’
We didn’t tell them the theme and they spat
out this serendipitous idea of 21 grams.” (21
grams is, according to early-20 th century
physician Duncan MacDougall, the weight
of a human soul.) “It came together so
beautifully. You can hear Suffa talking about
his daughter who’s just been
born. It’s so real. I love them.
They’re literally beautiful
people. That’s why we
made it the final song,
‘cause it’s like okay, see
you later, this is us and
we’re out.”
•
Everyone We
Know
is out February
10 via Universal.