Broods bare all for Pop Monster
Georgia and Caleb Nott talk to Kate Robertson about breaking free from the LA recording beast, to create their best album yet.
The day I speak with Broods is a sweaty one. A sticky, humid summer’s day in Auckland. We meet at Las Vegas – the Karangahape Rd strip club turned pop-up restaurant – the day before the music duo, siblings Georgia and Caleb Nott, are heading to their home town, Nelson, for Christmas. The windows are open, but you wouldn’t know it, and beads of sweat start forming on my upper lip in the steamy second floor of the inner-city landmark. Luckily, the music duo dive into conversation with ease, undeterred by the heat or my sweat. Their reputation for being genuinely enjoyable company holds true. We’re there to talk about their soon-to-bereleased third album, Don’t Feed The Pop Monster. It’s pop music to dance, cry, shout and feel to, where the lyrics burn and the beats get you some degree of high. It’s been three years since Broods’ sophomore album Conscious, and five years since their debut Evergreen. The fun, somewhat alternative pair first broke on to the New Zealand singles chart in 2014, with their debut hit Bridges. In the years since they’ve moved to Los Angeles, won 10 New Zealand Music Awards, collaborated on tracks with the likes of Flight Facilities, Tove Lo and Troye Sivan, and released music under their respective solo projects Fizzy Milk (Caleb) and The Venus Project (Georgia). But this album is, by far, their greatest achievement. It’s fun, bursting with life, sounds unlike anything else circling the highly saturated pop sphere right now, and they’re making up for years of monochromatic styling – something Caleb, 26, admits ‘‘wasn’t a very good portrayal of us as people’’ – by embracing colourful everything. They debuted their rebrand last August with the release of the album’s lead single Peach, an upbeat bop that celebrates being comfortably fine. Georgia, 24, says the immediate and overwhelming positive feedback they received was ‘‘very reassuring that people are understanding where we’re coming from’’. ‘‘Even fans who don’t really know us personally will be like ‘this seems so you!’ It’s like, oh sick. I’m glad that you noticed!’’ The album took two years to make. Production kicked off following news they’d been dropped by their US label, Capitol Records. There was zero job security but, for the first time in their careers, they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, finally freed of the ‘‘Pop Monster’’. ‘‘[The Pop Monster] is kind of like LA,’’ Georgia says. ‘‘It’s a few different aspects of the industry.’’ ‘‘We have, in the past, been made to feel like we [had] to follow a formula to have success musically – making songs for radio rather than songs to [perform] and listen to.’’ ‘‘We were made to feel like we wouldn’t have a career unless it was a certain type of music or a certain way that we presented ourselves. ‘‘There were [times] where I was on shoots and they would wait until I was just about to go and do my part, and they’d be like, ‘your hair looks weird’.’’ Newly liberated, this time around they wrote the album then approached a label. They eventually signed with Neon Gold Records in the US. ‘‘It’s the first time we’d had our own ideas and people being excited about what we wanted to do,’’ Caleb says. Don’t Kill The Pop Monster acknowledges pain as just another part of life. For Georgia, writing about pain ‘‘makes it less hopeless’’. ‘‘Feeling sad and feeling lost, and feeling confused and feeling anxious – it’s not the end of the world. It’s just a part of being a human being. To think you are weak or weird or an idiot for feeling like that is just the stupidest thing. ‘‘You have to feel those things to grow, you have to go through these painful growth spurts and you have to confront things that are hard to confront,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s not about being happy all the time, it’s about learning all the time, and experiencing. When you find peace with it, nothing can really break you down.’’ The pair don’t hold back. The chorus of opening track Sucker repeats the lyric ‘‘I’m such a sucker for everything’’ while Hospitalized pulls the listener into a hyped up, burnout-filled vortex. Everytime You Go muses on the uncomfortable relationship we all have with hard goodbyes, and Dust – the song Georgia says will be ‘‘the soundtrack to my life forever’’ – deals with the feeling of being ‘‘so close to going crazy all the time’’. The intensity of the songs makes you wonder whether there were times when the pair felt they had nothing left to give. Georgia says there were definitely lots of tears, but the ideas never stopped. ‘‘The songs literally just flowed through,’’ she says. Or, as Caleb puts it dryly, ‘‘we didn’t do any headbanging [in the studio], we were just like, yep! That sounds f .... d up, let’s put it in!’’ Now both in their mid-20s, Georgia describes the record as a bit of ‘‘a quarter life crisis album’’. ‘‘I think that is who this album is for. [It’s for] people who are feeling a little bit lost and feeling like they’ve got some really hard questions they need to ask themselves or things they need to face.’’ It’s also the first record to feature a song with Caleb’s vocals at the forefront. That song, Too Proud, is a raw, vulnerable expression of the helplessness that can take hold in the midst of mental health struggles and, in particular, men who’ve spent their lives being subjected to the ‘‘don’t show weakness’’ mentality. The chorus repeats, over and over – ‘‘Too many times that I’ve been too proud to let it out’’. ‘‘We were almost going to get Georgia to sing it. Then we just decided I should sing it,’’ Caleb says. ‘‘It’s [about] the whole ‘toughen up’ stigma of New Zealand, and small-town New Zealand. It’s the whole idea that men aren’t allowed to [have] feelings, that they should just get on with it and deal with it. But what is dealing with it? ‘‘[Society] is constantly saying ‘deal with it’, but with what tools? What tools do I need to deal with that? But not everyone gets to write songs about it, which is a huge help.’’ This willingness to bare all is one of the duo’s greatest strengths. They’re able to articulate things some of us struggle to share with our closest friends. ‘‘That’s the beauty of art, it makes all that s... make sense,’’ says Georgia. ‘‘It makes it feel like it wasn’t in vain. ‘‘That is how we get through all of the stupid things that we feel and all of the hard obstacles we come across. We write about them and make it into something we can essentially make into a job for ourselves. It’s the best revenge.’’ As the interview comes to a close and it’s time to take photos in the increasingly thick air, I tell them about how I accidentally hit shuffle halfway through the album and landed on the Pitbull song International Love, a stark contrast to the soothing Broods tracks I’d been taking in. We agree there’s a time and a place for such bangers, but Caleb knows Broods aren’t the band for the job. ‘‘We’re not meant to fulfil that area of pop. We’re here to fulfil a different kind of pop.’’ That ‘‘different pop’’ means using their platform to talk about pain and mental illness, because the more voices that chime in, the more the stigma fades. "If you’re going to be an artist and you’re going to have people look at what you’re doing and hear what you’re doing,’’ says Georgia, ‘‘you might as well say something f ..... g worthwhile. What’s the point otherwise?’’ Don’t Kill The Pop Monster will be available from February 1.