It’s 9AM on a Saturday morning when I reach Angus Andrew of Liars for an interview. It’s an hour I consider fairly challenging for the weekend, and I’m dazed and sluggish. For the Australian bush-dwelling Andrew, however, it’s already 6PM and he’s spent his Saturday “in the city, doing interviews.” Despite having every excuse to be tired or crabby he’s engaged and sharp, and his lucidity stands in stark contrast to my morning torpor. Without the languor of Andrew’s Aussie drawl, which persists despite long periods spent living and making music far from his homeland, you might even call him peppy.
The forthcoming Liars record Titles With the Word Fountain, a sort of sequel/B-sides/sister album hybrid to 2017’s TFCF, is (if you’ll forgive a clumsy parallel) also an exercise in contrasts. It’s fitful and amorphous, all creaking, whispered ambience one moment and thundering, high-pressure beats the next. Glossy keyboard sounds and funereal drones coolly tolerate each other. It’s an album that doesn’t really vie for your attention — it just kind of abstrusely gets on with itself and shrugs when you’re drawn near. While musical worlds away it reminds me slightly of Frank Ocean’s Blonde or Marching Church’s Coming Down — each record is ostensibly unconcerned by structure or hooks, occupied wholly by texture, the forthright transmission of ideas or feelings and the potential of sound as conveyance. Andrew is less wanky about it.
“I used a slapdash kind of approach,” he tells me. “When I look back at Liars records I can see this pattern where there’s a record that’s super laboured over and then a really quick one afterwards.”
I ask about the feeling of restlessness. TFCF explores the decline of a treasured creative partnership and all the associated emotions, so it makes sense that a collection of songs from the same period are tense and disorienting.
“TFCF is, to me, a highly structured and curated album. I had to say exactly what I needed to say. And then the label wanted to do a deluxe version of that record and I had some B-side stuff — a few songs that they wanted to put on that. I saw the opportunity to, you know, release, expunge, totally drain out all that work I did in that period. Just get it out. Which is a really good feeling for me. It meant that Titles is way more loose. If I was writing a song and getting to a point where I was like ‘I’m not sure what this should do,’ I’d just stop. Whereas songs on the previous record I would labour over, on and on.”
“It comes from the setup I used for TFCF — I recorded myself playing a bunch of instruments in LA and brought all that information on hard drives with me to Australia and chopped it all up and put it back together. There’s definitely more ambience in the second record. There’s more instrumentals. It’s just like doing all the stuff that you wanna do on a regular album but you feel too confined by songs, singles, stuff like that. It’s so nice to be able to not work in those confines. You’re going for an immediate mood with the piece rather than a verse chorus verse kind of journey.”
In breakup album tradition the TFCF / TWTWF suite certainly seems to have been a cathartic work for the artist. But there are few sickly-sweet reminiscences or gooey nostalgia trips to be found here. But Andrew doesn’t want his output as Liars to be read as “scary music”, despite the prevalence within it of dark and abrasive soundscapes.
“I never liked to hear it but I’ve always heard it a lot. ‘Oh, Liars is a scary band.’ Maybe the shows can get a bit intense or something but it always shocks me. That’s never been an intention. I hate even thinking about it because it brings on a masculine connotation and it’s just awful, so… I would love to just make pretty music, but I feel like I don’t have so much control over what comes out. And if it seems aggressive or scary it’s weird, because that’s not really the intention, you know?”
I struggle a bit with this. I can’t imagine very many people hearing “Broken Witch” from 2004’s They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and not feeling that its purpose was at least partially to make listeners shit themselves. But although Andrew can’t decide how the music is received once it’s released, he is the sole authority when it comes to his artistic intentions. Whatever the case, he’s not prescriptive about it.
“Where would we be without interpretation? The motivation can be different, but that’s part of it.”
It’s interesting that he associates scariness with masculinity. Andrew is refreshingly candid about what he finds intimidating, and my 9AM analysis leads me to conclude that it’s the reticent aspect, the boys don’t cry comportment of traditional manly mannishness that creeps him out. For someone that makes a living telling large amounts of people how they feel it’s a pretty rational concern.
“I think there’s a larger male audience [for the experimental genres]. Hopefully it’s on the cusp of really changing. In Australia right now I certainly know of a lot of great experimental female artists. But it’s been a male-dominated thing forever. It almost makes you not wanna participate. It’s something you live with and I guess you maybe subconsciously try to deal with in your work. Bringing it up and talking about it is a thing. But it’s not like I can really do that much about it. I don’t hate all dudes and I appreciate anyone that’s a fan of the band, but it’s just who I am I guess. It’s tough navigating the differences between everyone nowadays.”
Andrew also names The Beatles as a childhood fear. I’m momentarily thrown, but he clarifies. The Four are his principal memory of the music played in his parents house, and for a youngster interested in art the fidelity and ornateness of classic pop functioned as a creative “KEEP OUT” sign rather than a call to action.
“[The Beatles] were just intimidating, really, I think. If you’re trying to get inspired it’s almost hard, because you’re just like ‘Oh, I can’t learn all that. How do you do that?’ But when you hear someone just banging or droning or something you’re like ‘Oh my God!’”
Bangs and drones arrived in Andrew’s life when he left Australia to attend art school in LA. He went to Cal Arts for photography and was struck by eccentric classes and classmates alike.
“The school’s pretty out there. They encourage you to do whatever. I started doing just as a much weird shit as I could. Eventually I was getting credit for this project which was basically to have a band but not actually make any music and just do all the other stuff that goes towards it. So I guess once I started doing that I was like ‘Well, why don’t I just make sound while I’m doing this?’ But I went to art school because I really wanted to learn. In Australia it’s very much about having a trade. And I felt like I was going there to learn a trade, which was photography. I think the first photo class I had they took us out into the grounds and had us start sticking polaroids to trees and I was just like ‘Oh Jesus, this is totally wrong. I was really worried about it. But yeah, eventually the weirdness worked on me.”
Cal Arts doesn’t lack weirdo musical alumni. Andrew was a peer of Ariel Pink and John Maus, although they didn’t hang out together.
“I wasn’t close with those guys. I do remember once I was blaring like, I think it was — it must’ve been Piper at the Gates of Dawn or something out of my studio and John knocked and he was like ‘I loooove that!’” Andrew does a pretty spot on Count von Count Maus voice. “I think that was my only interaction.”
Once settled, Andrew met now-former Liars bandmate Aaron Hemphill who exposed him to all the bangs and drones that had escaped his purview back home in Australia.
“He turned me onto weird stuff. He had a trunk full of CDs and I remember opening that up and being like ‘Woah.’ Early Sonic Youth and stuff like that. I hadn’t heard Suicide before, you know? It totally said to me ‘Oh wait, maybe I can do this.’ Because those people weren’t pretending to be musicians or anything, you know. It’s more like I have an idea and a song or a sound is the way to convey it. But it’s not about how skilful I am at bending notes or anything. And so getting over that, and getting that inspiration was totally what led me to start making music.”
“It sucks when people are intimidated creatively. You could never pay me to draw something. It’s just too frightening — people are too good at it. But I think the best drawings aren’t the best drawn, you know what I mean? If I could just get over that myself… well, that’s how I feel.”
Andrew quickly become comfortable playing alongside fellow musicians, rapidly pulled into the orbit of the four track that’s omnipresent across a multitude of band origin myths.
“I would play bass mostly. We had a drum kit in my studio and we’d take acid and shoot video of ourselves playing along to like Sabbath or something. That was the early stuff. And then you’d turn the Sabbath off and hit record on the four track, and realise that you could flip the tape over and there were even more tracks you could record… it was just really exciting. At that time we made a tape and took it to, jeez, what is that big record company in LA… shit, I forget. But we walked in and put it on the receptionist’s desk thinking ‘This is how it works.’ But it obviously didn’t, and so when I finished art school I moved to New York and put an ad up for people who wanted to play bass or drums. And that was the start.”
Andrew worked for “a famous ceramicist” in SoHo to support himself during his search for collaborators.
“It sounds cooler than it was, trust me. I was living with maybe seven people or something and our rent was just astronomical. It was a real grind. But in the middle of having to work a job and do all that we were always just making as much music as possible, still with the same four track.”
Despite aiming to reach a "sort of peak state, which is transcendent or something" in live performance, Andrew struggled with early shows in New York. Suffering from crushing stage fright, he'd take pains to avoid the kind of awkward, anxiety-inducing stand-around sessions inherent in the experience of any nascent group.
"[The early shows] were at a place called Siberia, I think. I’m sure it doesn’t exist any more. But it was in a subway and we had to actually move the garbage cans to the side so we could have a stage. I just remember being so frightened of it all. It never really changed. Like, the whole performance part — I really like it but it’s really — I have a lot of anxiety about it. So that was just the start of trying to figure out how to cope with that. When we were playing those kind of shows I started doing stuff like we’d drop all our gear off and when you’re supposed to wait in the green room I’d go and drive the van around the block until right when you had to walk onstage. Just ridiculous stuff because I just could not get comfortable. I think that’s pretty true still. Back in those days you didn’t have a dressing room or anything like that. You had to stand there and talk to people and that’s a nightmare to me. I just avoided that at all costs."
As Andrew said, he’s prone to a pendulum-swing style of working in which he labours obsessively on an album and then rapidly follows it up with a looser, less precise counterpart. We go on to discuss his twin tendencies in more depth and the ways in which he approaches recording when he’s in a more exacting headspace. One such project was the aforementioned They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. A conceptual work focusing on historical witch-hunting, it allowed Andrew to dive headlong into folklore and construct a narrative-driven record with fleshed-out characters and plot movement.
“I was living with the TV On The Radio guys in New Jersey when we did the witch record. We went out into the woods and really freaked out. It was the first time I’d ever had a lot of gear in the basement and I could just record all night. We all jumped onto the witch thing and we’d take walks in the forest at night to scare each other and have fires and stuff. It was my first experience of really living a project.”
“I love getting deep into projects and getting way conceptual and researching — I love that stuff. When I can get myself in that mindset and ready to do a project like that I love to do it. But what really takes confidence to be like ‘Here’s a recording, cool. I’m just gonna put it out there.’ That’s a very liberating stance which is exciting for me.
Whether it’s measured conceptual works or compulsive documents of a particular moment, Andrew suggests Liars won’t be slowing down any time soon.
“I’m always thinking about the next record. I’m playing with Australian guys who are more jazz oriented, which is really fun and interesting for me. It’s really exciting when I get the opportunity to work with people who’re really enthusiastic but also super musicians. I’m just in awe of people who of what people can do, you know? What takes me a whole afternoon of trying to piece a guitar chord together I show to one of these guys and they’re like ‘Oh, what do you mean? That? Oh, that. Yeah.’ It’s like the sky’s the limit in terms of what we can do. The next record — I don’t know, man. It’s hard for me not to imagine that I wouldn’t take advantage of playing with people that are really great players.”
Performance might still make Andrew nervous, but that anxiety can't match his enthusiasm. It's heartening to see an artist who's ready to acknowledge and explore his creative fears but refuses to bow to them. There might be a necessary precariousness and inconstancy to making music as a job, but you can view that essential insecurity as a curse or a source of opportunity. I'd conclude that Andrew falls into the latter camp.
"Everywhere I've made music has had a big impact on me. New York because of the intensity of it and the grind. New Jersey. Berlin was about this real isolation for me, and it was amazing in terms of inspiration. And then LA felt like finally getting the chance to do a lot of things that I couldn’t have even imagined when I was at art school in LA long before that. But now that I'm in Australia, man, I've gotta say... I've got to say it's the most interesting environment so far. It's just what's happening now. I'm inspired by so many things, I've seen less of Australia than I have of the rest of the world, the musicians that I'm hearing here, I live in a really interesting and weird place... the place question is pretty similar to me to like 'Which is your favourite record?' And generally if I’m forced to answer any question like that I would always go with the most recent, because that’s the truth. That's where you're at."
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The new Liars album Titles With The Word Fountain is out now on MUTE.
