More about: Whitney

Almost a month on from the release of SPARK, our Whitney obsession hasn’t slowed at all. Signalling a dramatic new era for the duo, leaning further into a big pop with a new sound palette - it was a fascinating turn.

In rehearsals to be ready for their rescheduled 2023 shows, the mission to bring SPARK to life isn’t an easy one. As what is undeniably their most complex work to date, we sat down to discuss recording, happy songs and unreleased favourites.

GW: So the new album SPARK is fantastic! I noticed that you haven’t changed style so much as changed your instrumental palette. Your older albums were more sort of rustic sounding whereas this album has a lot more electronics and synths. How did that come about? 

Whitney: Well, we started using instruments like the mellotron and sampled drums and stuff like that. Once we started hearing those sounds we got really inspired by how they were making the songs feel and we just leaned into it as heavily as we could. It felt really good with the spirit of the songs and eventually it became the aesthetic of the album.

One thing I noticed about the album was that it has some of the most upbeat stuff you’ve done such as ‘REAL LOVE’ and ‘MEMORY’ sat alongside some of your calmest tracks yet -  were those two extremes a conscious decision or was that just the sort of thing you were writing at the time? 

I mean, we never have any kind of grand agenda or anything like ‘oh the next records gonna be this, this, and this’ - it’s just always that the ideas come really organically and we’re just chasing them and following those ideas to their greatest state of being and mode of existence. So with a song like ‘TWIRL’, we’ve got a sort of baby idea and… it’s kind of hard to put it into words, we’re not like ‘oh well this songs not worth finishing because it’s really slow’ or whatever ‘people are going to think it’s boring’. You know, if we’re moved by it then we’re going to work on it and it’s good enough to put on the album. Looking back on the album once we’d finished, when you’re in the process of writing, you’re in this kind of myopic world where you’re kind of zoomed in on an idea. Looking back on it, we were both surprised at how much width and breadth the album has. You look at songs like ‘SELF’ and ‘TERMINAL’ and then songs like ‘MEMORY’ and ‘BLUE’, you put it really well, like the upbeat pop stuff and then the most, we would say, experimental stuff we’ve done - we didn’t realise the album was like that until we listened to it back for the first time.

Where did the title come from? 

We just basically knew that we didn’t want to just call the album like ‘NEVER CROSSED MY MIND’ or ‘BLUE’. I think we got kind of tired of just naming our albums after our favourite songs. And instead were leaning towards kinda… naming the album something catchy, like an umbrella term for the songs under it,  it felt like a very pop thing to do. So that’s probably where our heads were at. But I mean SPARK, it's about inspiration, that’s what the title means. 

I wanted to talk about the visuals, because the videos have been really cool. I really like the ‘REAL LOVE’ video where it’s like all the mirrors. How did you make that happen? 

That’s a concept that had been brewing for a while but figuring out how to actually pull that off was pretty difficult. Our buddy Aaron Brown was able to find a way to do it. They built like this tiny little mirror room that we were completely enclosed in, and there’s like a hole for the camera with a wide angle lens. So for the main shots we were in a small box of plexi mirror stuff and they were able to move the fourth wall a bit so they could move the camera around a bit more but that one was a lot of fun to shoot. Since then, we came up with some more visuals in whatever way we could because we’d already spent all the money! 

So did you do a lot of the following visuals yourself then? Like just you guys and your mate? 

The 'TWIRL' video I feel like was the best example. We just went up to this house we’d done a bunch of writing in which is close to a lake and we just swam around. 

That awesome! So you still believe in that kind of D.I.Y feel like with bands in general? 

I mean for us it’s quite new, like we always used to hire someone or delegate music videos out because it’s never really been in our wheelhouse. We never learnt how to professionally do that stuff. So getting to do it ourselves has been really fun. It’s purely a new thing that we’ve gotten to do.

It’s cool because you guys are a fairly big band so it’s cool that you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty! I wanted to talk a little about the lyrical themes on the album. To me at least, you guys have always occupied this space where the music sounds pretty happy but the lyrics are always pretty deep. What were you guys thinking about when you were writing the lyrics? 

Our first album, Light Upon The Lake was truly a break up record with a hopeful ending, FTA (Forever Turned Around) was like ‘what the hell is going on?’, a record about paranoia and anxiety. With this one, I just felt like we really wanted it to be well rounded and for there to be like a diverse set of sentiments on the track list. When you’re writing lyrics to a song, a lot of people describe it this way, but it’s like putting a puzzle together. On FTA it was really difficult; there were so many lyrical revisions. But on this one, everything just clicked together, like you know how a Beatles song sounds? Like it always already existed in the human consciousness but it didn’t? The chorus to 'MEMORY' felt like that. It’s just so obvious what the string of words should be and what the hook should be. It’s so satisfying when that happens. 

Yeah because I noticed that a lot of the songs are a lot more hopeful this time, a lot of big pop songs. I imagine that’ll be fun live? Is this tour the first time you’re playing the songs? 

So, we’re just about to start rehearsals with the band so we can really figure them out. It’s really exciting, that’s happening in the next week or so. The only one that we’ve figured out so far is ‘REAL LOVE’ because we did Kimmel and played it as a band. It’s like reliving the writing process in a way. We get really excited about the song again because you get to figure out how to pull it off and relearn it in a different way and reset it in your brain, covering all the ideas in real time as opposed to in the studio.

Do you guys see it as an opportunity to put different twists on the songs, as opposed to translating it straight from the record? 

It always starts with us trying to perfect the songs as a whole. Like just get tight as a band with it. But as we are as musicians, if we don’t try and change things around we get bored with it. So naturally it takes on its own shape as we go. 

You guys got any plans for the next year apart from touring? Or is it gonna be a four year gap between albums again? 

It’s funny, like we did a tour last year where we took everyone’s phones away and played some of the new record and there’s a few songs that didn’t quite fit on the record. One of them feels like it could be a single and another one which should wind up on the next record and that track’s called ‘Early Trains’. It was really powerful when we played those shows. It was a lot of peoples favourite moment of the set. Honestly I think putting together a set with a few powerful surprises and weaving some old tracks, like getting creative with the set list is something we’re really excited about! 

SPARK is out now

Issue Four of the Gigwise Print magazine is on pre-order now! Order here.

More about: Whitney