Image by Dana Trippe //

We caught up with Caleb Nott of brother/sister duo Broods to get the inside word on their triumphant new record, Don’t Feed The Pop Monster.

Having recently taken out the #19 spot on triple j’s Hottest 100 with their hit ‘Peaches’, dropped their finest and most adventurous record to date, and further established themselves as one of the world’s premiere indie-electro outfits, it would seem that New Zealand’s Broods are masterfully navigating the music industry at the moment. Go back a year or so earlier and you realise that it was not all smooth sailing, with the pair reaching a career-defining crossroad that shaped their latest record Don’t Feed The Pop Monster.

Here, we chat with Caleb about how the freedom not having a record label and how it changed the direction of Broods:

You wrote a lot of ‘Don’t Feed The Pop Monster’ in the Nicaraguan Jungle, what your motivation for going there? How did it influence the record?

Nicaragua wasn’t necessarily like somewhere we were trying to go to write, but we were invited on a writing camp with a bunch of other musicians and stuff. Joel Little was kind of the … How the hell would you say it? The curator. He curated the people that came on the trip…

Half the people there were already our friends and by the end of it, everyone else was like our best friend, as well. It was just a really magical week where all your worries and anxieties that you usually have when you’re like at your house, I guess. And literally the only thing you have to worry about is writing music. So it was a very freeing and, I guess, an opening experience.

The title of the new record is pretty direct. Did you guys really feel like you needed to give yourself that license to cut loose and make a “statement”?

The music industry is such a strange thing to be a part of and there’s a lot of people with opinions that shouldn’t have opinions on what you’re doing because it’s your music that you’re making. This album was such a nice period of time to go through. I mean, it was stressful and it was a very anxious time for us because, you know, we’re very quickly running out of money and we didn’t have a label, but because we didn’t have a label, we were only relying on our opinions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddNYtILMzS8

Is ’Too Proud’ is your official singing debuting the band? Why has it taken so long?

Well, it is definitely my debut as like a lead vocalist… I guess even growing up singing wasn’t really my thing. I get a lot more satisfaction by grooving on a bass guitar or making a drum beat, I think. So it was very much that day that I was like, “Man, I’m going to sing this song.” And now, I’m just going, “Holy shit, I’m going to actually sing this live.” Freaking out.

Is it a taste of things to come?

I don’t know. We’ll see how it feels.

‘Sucker’ is quite a powerful opener. It’s easy to imagine people listening to that with the album’s title in mind, and also having people listening to that and thinking about a relationship they can’t quit. What was your intention there?

Yeah. I guess that song is very much like how we felt writing this recording. How we feel in the music industry a lot of the time, like, we’re a band that sucks at Instagram, like, we struggle to like keep up with the whole imagery of like being in the music industry and trying to keep relevant. So it’s a song about kind of dropping that anxiety about staying relevant, and just actually just making something and not worrying about it.

There’s like a real 80’s vibe happening in the ‘Peach’ clip. Is that something that you’ve always been interested in? It’s quite different to the clean-cut, digitalised videos that people may associate with your genre.

We’ve always wanted to make a film with Sam [Kristofski]. Our dads used to work together at the same place, so we used to like hang out as families a lot. We grew up and ended up being in the same kind of space in LA. And we like love his aesthetic and how he like gets across like subtle humor and things like that. The goal for ‘Peach’ was for it to be a very ambiguous time. It wasn’t meant to be ’80s or ’70s or ’90s. It was meant to be like confusing, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eiht451O8fM

Are there songs on the record that you really want people to hear? Ones that you think are going to expose them to a different side of Broods, or blow their minds?

Definitely. I’d really like to play ‘To Belong’ and ‘Old Dogs’ live… It’s cool to ‘Old Dog’ out to the world because it’s produced by me and that’s like the first time I’ve produced a Broods track. So it’s exciting to get like those out. ‘Hostile Eyes’ is going to be so fun because it’s just mental and just… I think the whole record’s just going to be super fun to play live. That’s what we’re most excited about because we’ve been listening to the songs for two years and now we’re just ready to go out and like give it to people.

Broods will be touring nationally over May and June in celebration of ‘Don’t Feed The Pop Monster’. Check out the dates below and head here to get you hands on tickets: