WELCOME TO • THE CLUB•
FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER OF HER POIGNANT POP-ROCK PARABLE, ALEX LAHEY HAS ESTABLISHED THE BEST OF LUCK CLUB: A HAVEN OF GOOD VIBES WHERE THE DRINKS FLOW FREELY, THE DRESS CODE IS NONEXISTENT, AND THE MUSIC COULDN’T BE MORE GROUSE.
It’s often argued that the best records are those with backstories penned in hell: writer’s block, drug addictions, bandmate rivalries and producers who may as well moonlight as serial killers, all collaborating to incite these volcanic eruptions of creativity. It’s been proven by everyone from David Bowie to My Chemical Romance, and judging by sales alone, one could say that in-studio turbulence is a prerequisite in the pursuit of brewing up a masterpiece.
Alas, the latest from Alex Lahey couldn’t be more definitive proof otherwise. Following the monolithic success of 2017’s ILoveYouLike
ABrother, the Melbourne pop-rocker buckled down with acclaimed producer Catherine Marks (whose near-flawless track record includes LPs from The Killers, Wolf Alice and The Wombats) to scratch up The Best Of Luck Club. La hey describes the studio process as “all the best bits of the montage”, the journey as gratifying as its end product is catchy (see: extremely).
“It was really wonderful to be working alongside someone like Catherine,” Lahey swoons. “It was literally just two girls sitting in the studio for months, making an album together, and it was so much fun. I learned so much from working with her. As an artist, it’s such a pleasure and such a privilege to be able to work with people like that, because you end up coming away from the process and the project feeling really empowered and inspired to do it again. To come away from a record or a tour and feel like, ‘Yeah, I want to do that again’ – that’s the best possible outcome. Because those parts of the jobs are really hard and taxing, and loaded with pressure and deadlines and all sorts of people wanting to weigh in. If you can come out of it being like, ‘That was great,’ then you’ve had the best possible experience. And I definitely had that doing this record.”
Whereas her first album and EP were collaborative efforts with a full band, Lahey plays almost everything on The Best Of Luck Club herself (yes, even the saxophone solos). Taking a more hands-on approach to the recording allowed her to hone in on the album’s individuality, ebbing and flowing across her own spate of influences – a resoundingly diverse one, spanning everything from gritty punk (“Misery Guts”) to smoky folk (“Black RMs”) – without losing its core flavour of human vulnerability via bright, high school disco-ready pop-rock. But the decision wasn’t borne of authoritarianism; Lahey still welcomed the input of her peers, using her role on the album
as its co-producer and primary performer as a diving board for creative collaboration.
“I just wanted to be more involved,” Lahey says. “And I think sometimes people get confused when people say they want to be more involved in a project, in that it’s like a desire to be in control – I’m not interested in having total control over a creative project, because I feel like that’s really stifling and I really like working with other people; I enjoy hearing what people have to say and receiving their input, and the reason I love that is because I learn so much from it, and I become a better artist from sharing that experience. With this record, I became so much more involved in the process because I just wanted to learn, and I wanted to really push myself as an artist.”
The end result is a record that not only perfectly follows the narrative of I Love You Like A Brother – Lahey’s still in the throes of her quarter-life crises, but has lived enough life in two years to navigate them with head and fists raised high – but also expands its tonal reservoir tenfold. Across a dazzling 40 minutes that feel like ten, Lahey swerves dextrously between crunchy Telecaster pummels, ashy baritone twangs and honey-sweet acoustic strums without ever making the transitions between them sound jarring. It’s fitting:
The Best Of Luck Club could be the soundtrack to its namesake, each track a new drunken punter’s heat-of-the-moment jukebox pick.
“I don’t think it was a matter of consciously doing that,” Lahey admits. “I’ve only really been playing the electric guitar seriously for the last, like, three or four years, and it’s funny to me because I used to get so confused why people who played the guitar were so obsessed with tone. But the reason why I think that is, is because with the guitar moreso than any other instrument, the variables are infinite. Whether it’s the pedals in your chain, the brand of strings you use, the pick you play with or the wood your guitar is made of, the pickups in that guitar, the amp you play it through, the speakers in that amp… I think that by default, when you get into the electric guitar, you just start exploring because you can. You get this itch to try different things, and make the same instrument sound one way one minute and completely different the next.
“One thing I had a lot of fun with on this record was pushing guitar tones into different spheres. There’s one pedal I used quite a bit on the record, the Meris Ottobit, which is basically a combination of a sequencer, a filter sequencer and a pitch sequencer. It’s probably not the most practical guitar pedal – the only thing I think it would work really well on a guitar is the bit crusher, because it’s actually a really cool distortion – but Catherine and I appropriated the pedal, so we were using the filter sequencer through drum overheads, or running synths through it. That was something that really excited me in the studio, to push things that were intended for the guitar onto some other sonics.”
Laying the record down at Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne, Lahey (a Fender girl by nature) had a stunning array of guitars at her disposal. But while a handful of different fretboards make their mark across the album’s ten cuts, Lahey chalks up its biggest soul-rattling riffs to one particular secret weapon.
“Okay, so my uncle is alive,” Lahey says, in what is totally a normal way to begin any story, “But he’s left a guitar to me in his will. And he was like, ‘You’ll get more use out of it now than I will while I’m alive,’ so I basically got an advanced inheritance from him in the form of a 12-string Roger McGuinn signature Rickenbacker. It’s this beautiful black electric 12-string, and the weird thing about it is that my uncle doesn’t really play the guitar, so I don’t know why he even had it. And the guy be bought it off didn’t play the guitar either, so it was in totally mint condition, and it’s just the most beautiful sounding guitar ever.
“I remember taking it to get serviced before I went into the studio, and guy who serviced it was like, ‘Where the f*** did you get this guitar!? I’ve never seen anything like it!’ He made me promise him that I would never take it out on the road, and I was like, ‘Dude, don’t worry, have you felt how heavy this f***ing thing is?’ It’s on most of the tracks on the record in some shape or form, and I love it so much. It’s just a nice little bit of my family that’s made it onto the record, which is really cool.”