Image by Courtney Allen //

We sat down with frontman Trenton Woodley to chat about today’s Hands Like Houses EP drop.

Despite their debut record, Ground Dweller coming out eight years ago, it feels a little weird to call alt-rockers Hands Like Houses veterans. On paper, they’ve done it all – world tours, millions of streams and amassed a legion of fans, but to call a group that is still radiating energy and backing it up with their most powerful music to date, “veterans” just doesn’t sit right.

Dropping today, their self-titled EP is evidence of a band that is not ready to rest on their laurels. Recording the five tracks in ten days in a Central Coast studio was a far cry from the LA recording sessions for 2018’s Anon., with the quintet clearly keen to push themselves and create those diamonds under pressure – the kind rock and roll mythology we read about in vintage magazines and see in muso biopics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5jSTR0hL-M&feature=youtu.be

Having had the pleasure of listening to it over the past couple of weeks (perks of the job!), we can confirm that the under-the-pump experiment has paid massive dividends. The EP is an intoxicating rush of big hooks driven by vocalist Trenton Woodley’s impassioned performance. Head here to buy/stream Hands Like Houses now and check out our interview with Trenton below:

You recently did your second Like A Version, how’d you come to choose ‘Shimmer’ by Fuel? What did you learn from the first one?

Having done it before, we knew a little bit about the process and how it would work going in there. Obviously, the difference between the little talk-back studios versus the full music studio was great. Nice to have that upgrade. A bit more space and room to move, which is good.

As far as picking the song, I think for us it was about just trying to find a song that was a good song to start with. I know that that sounds pretty broad, but I think we tend to gravitate towards classic sort of tracks, especially from that era, because a lot of those songs were really strong on their own merit, whether you played on acoustic or a piano, or as a full band.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrPhid2pn6Y

You recorded the EP in 10 days, which is crazy. Was it an intense environment? How did you react under the pressure? Tell us about the process?

So this time around, we had the beach house in Avoca which was comfortable. Having a place where we could go down to the beach in the morning and record during the day, go out for dinner at night, made for a good healthy environment. It was about creating a relaxing space so we could to get the job done. The pressure came in and kind of counterbalanced that, so I don’t want to think about what it would have been like if we didn’t have that nice environment.

Why did you choose to do an EP as opposed to a full length?

It was more about putting a collection of songs together as singles, but still in a way that there was still a cohesive sense of continuity and narrative. You look at statistics, you look at your analytics on Spotify for example, and people just switch off after track five, track six. Even fairly dedicated fans of your music, they might just pop it on when they get into the car, and by the time they’ve gotten to where they’re going, they’ve only listened to five or six songs. The back half of the album often gets forgotten.

We’ve always tried to ,ake every song the best it can be, to the point where every song could be a single, that’s what we try to do. So I think it was just about focussing on that and not spending a whole bunch of time on songs that would kind of disappear into the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwPlkNYXnjU

‘Dangerous’ feels like it sums up the anxious frustration people around the world have been feeling with COVID – when did you write it? What were you experiencing when you wrote that track?

That was the first song we kind of locked in on vocally and it was a song that came out of trying one thing – it’s almost like the honesty bled through, if that makes sense. As I started writing it and especially with the amount of pressure and stress that we were feeling already in those first few days, it just kind of took on that energy.

There’s so much pop sensibility wrapped up in ‘Stranger’ – vocal hook after vocal hook – but it still has that heavy feel. Do you ever write tracks where you think you’re pushing the boundaries of what HLH fans expect?

We’ve always tried to put our best foot forward and sometimes that is going to piss people off and they can feel like we’ve abandoned something, but I think for us, it’s just about taking each idea that comes, case-by-case basis. Sure, we’re conscious of it. I think that there are definitely songs that we’ve cut because they didn’t feel like something we would do. It’s given us some really good challenges as well though. It really is a song-by-song basis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AorRPt7X0bQ

You guys are “veterans” of the Aus music scene now – what advice would you give to HLH before they went in to record ‘Ground Dweller’?

Take it easy. Tone it back a bit. I think we were trying too hard to be something and, while that is what caught a lot of people’s attention and imaginations, I think it really made it difficult for us to figure out what was next. I think the biggest thing is just, strap in for the long haul, don’t throw yourself so hard at some particular goal that you have because all the biggest opportunities are the ones that actually work out when you slow down a bit and kind of take a look around you, instead of just what’s ahead and what’s obvious.

It’s starting to hopefully feel like we’re approaching the end of the lockdowns… What have you guys got planned touring/show-wise?

We hate postponing gigs. Kicking it down the road a bit further. So we’re probably going to hold off on announcing things unless we have really specific plans in place, but we have some really cool ideas coming.