After fleeing sunny Australia for Berlin, the members of Parcels met a couple of French legends and began writing their own beautifully complex story.
Culture shock isn’t something entirely new to the five Aussie expats who make up Parcels, but that’s not stopping keyboardist Louie Swain from feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment.
Reached in frigid Montreal, where the quintet’s playing the 600-capacity Fairmount Theatre, the Byron Bay–raised musician says he’s okay with the subzero weather. Living in Berlin for the past few years has prepared Swain and his bandmates— Patrick Hetherington, Noah Hill, Anatole “Toto” Serret, and Jules Crommelin—for the kind of winters Australians are lucky enough to avoid at home.
The German city also taught Parcels the value of patience, and not just with overcoming language barriers. “We spent two years just practising in Berlin before we played any serious shows,” Swain says, speaking on his cell. “That was really because we didn’t know how, or what to do, to get shows.”
What’s taking some adjusting to at the moment is the fact Parcels hasn’t quite become a major draw on this side of the Atlantic—as opposed to Europe, where it now pops up at high-wattage festivals like Glastonbury.
“We’re about five shows into this tour and it’s started off pretty rocky,” Swain admits candidly. “It’s all felt really overwhelming being in America. For one, we’re sort of playing smaller venues than we’re used to in Europe, which kind of feels like we’re stepping backward a year, in a weird way. It’s not that it’s bad—it’s just more that we have to readjust our mindsets a bit.”
Those who love being able to say “I saw them when” can thank the electro-analogue, disco-prog, futuristic–mor gods that Parcels is currently playing small club shows in North America. But look for that to change in the coming 12 months, as the band plans to tour relentlessly in support of its wildly accomplished eponymous debut full-length, released last October.
Pulling off the impressive trick of sounding both forward-looking and obsessed with the past, the album casts Parcels as a band as enamoured with Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, and Chic as it is with Justice’s daring Audio, Video, Disco. With its metronome-steady percussion, wavering flutes, and sumptuously analogue synths, “Tape” plants one foot in magic-years FM radio and the other in the Korova Milk Bar. The cokehazed “Iknowhowifeel”, meanwhile, sounds like 2040 funk as we imagine it might have sounded in 1978.
The reference points run deep on Parcels. Consider the eight-minutelong “Everyroad”, which is built around spoken-word ruminations on the quest for mental peace and settings that convey a physical tranquillity. Starting out like a mellowgold self-help meditation, the track slowly builds to something more menacing, with 3 a.m.–nightmare synth waves eventually giving way to gorgeously regal strings. Swain is happy to explain the inspiration.
“I love interviewing people, so I walked around Berlin talking to people who’d been in the city for a long time,” he says. “We had themes we wanted to explore in the song, so I’d give them palm cards to read and answer. That’s something that we read Pink Floyd did for Dark Side of the Moon.”
Parcels is more than mentally equipped for the challenges of cracking North America. After years playing everything from modern folk to speed-jacked metal in different groups, Swain and his bandmates came together with a blueprint.
“When we started Parcels, we wanted to cherry-pick the best bits of the projects that we’d been in previously and then combine it into one thing,” Swain says. “Like, one of the things we’d done was a folk band where we sang a lot of harmonies, so we took that and brought it to Parcels. But we didn’t really have fun live shows with the folk band. Because we love to see people dance, we started Parcels with the idea of having a really high-energy live show.”
Taking their name from an old post-office sign found in Swain’s home, the quintet released a debut 2015 EP called Clockscared, played a handful of Australian shows, and then decided they’d challenge themselves by moving to Berlin.
That geographic decision was made partly because England and France were too expensive, and partly because—judging by a Whitest Boy Alive video shot in a shop window in the neighbourhood of Mitte—they thought Berlin looked Euro-cooler than David Bowie in ’77.
Swain spoke no German, but he knew how to clean an apartment, something he did as a job as he and his bandmates got settled. Being strangers in a strange land gave the chance to focus on making music with almost no outside distractions. Early live shows in London and Paris led to the group being discovered by the members of Daft Punk, who took Parcels into the studio and oversaw the 2017 single “Overnight”.
Parcels absorbed every bit of advice handed down by the French techno legends, especially on the importance of making a record that can’t be pegged to one particular pop-music decade. That would prove huge when they got to work on the self-produced Parcels.
“Daft Punk told us that their only goal in making music was to make music that could exist in any era,” Swain says. “So, yeah, that’s definitely something that we talked about. Like, to get that warm analogue sound we did all the vocals through an oldschool tape machine. And we’d get a recording sounding great on a deck and then run big chunks of it through the tape machine. We were working in a beautiful studio with all kinds of great gear, and we had an engineer— who we actually owe a lot to—who was a wizard really up for showing us all kinds of crazy trickery.”
One thing he didn’t have to teach the members of Parcels to do was to get along. Normally, having five band members share the producer’s chair during 14-hour hauls in the studio is a recipe for fireworks and misery.
Luckily, Swain says, everyone in Parcels has benefited from their laid-back upbringing in Australia. Adapting—whether to living in Berlin or to relearning how to play clubs—is easy when you’ve got the right mindset.
“The entire process really taught us even more of a mutual respect for one another,” Swain says. “It’s important to let someone play their ideas out instead of instantly shutting them down. We knew when to jump in and when to jump out, and that rhythm really worked out. We’re all supremely chill. It’s a product of where we grew up. So when we’re in the studio, we’re all producers, but we also know our places.” g Parcels plays Fortune Sound Club on Tuesday (March 5).