Hatchie’s sustainable pop dream

It’s a big idea tucked in amongst exactly the kind of woozy guitar lines and shimmering drums that have become her signature sound. This quiet realisation sets the tone for an understatedly cinematic album, which sees Hatchie reckoning with belonging, meaning and change in a more grown-up way than ever before.

When I speak to the singer/songwriter - born Harriette Pilbeam – she’s at home in Melbourne. She and her husband and collaborator, Joe Agius, did indeed recently let some of their previous world slip away, moving back to her native Australia after several years in London. “We just kind of decided that the quality of life is so much better here,” she says. “London is just not a very liveable city unless you’re rich.”

Her life in Melbourne is neatly compartmentalised between work and music. A handful of days a week, she works as an optometrist selling glasses; the other days, she’s writing, recording and being a pop star. “It does feel a bit like Hannah Montana at times!” she laughs. The fact that she has to wear glasses as part of her uniform at work – glasses she actually doesn’t need – only adds to the Clark Kent of it all.

The DNA of Hatchie’s music has always been wide eyed and heartfelt but this has taken a variety of shapes over the course of her career. “Sugar & Spice” back in 2018 introduced her as a melody-forward dream-pop songwriter. Her debut album Keepsake leaned further into poppy tradition, stepping away from the haziness of her early stuff and bringing vocals and hooks to the music’s foreground. 2022’s The follow-up album Giving the World Away expanded things further with bigger guitar sounds, sharper synths and a real sense of big stage ambitions. Festival appearances and a stint supporting Kylie Minogue soon followed.

Liquorice comes not as a retreat from that size, but as something more delicate and refined. That shift was not particularly deliberate. Writing without deadline or assignment, Pilbeam stopped trying to reposition herself. “I think I stopped worrying about how big something sounded”.

But there are definitely big songs in the bunch. The title track soars with youthful romance, while lyrics such as “All I need is your liquorice kiss/ Suddenly seventeen and whatever you want from me” and “Can’t a girl get her one wish? Tell me I’m not being selfish” allow the song to play out like a teen movie: physical, longing, unguarded.

“I think I was just trying to write more directly this time,” she tells me. “Less hiding behind reverb and big metaphors.” Pilbeam attributes some of that directness to working so closely with her partner Agius. The two write and arrange the songs together. “Sometimes I’ll overthink a line and he’ll say, ‘Just say it like that’. He’s good at getting me out of my head.”

This lyrical directness is perhaps clearest on “Someone Else’s News”, one of the most quietly affecting songs on the record. Pilbeam describes it simply: “It’s about a strange feeling more than a sad one.” The song details the moment of realising that someone you were once extremely close with now exists fully outside your life, moving on a timeline that no longer touches yours (“What’s a girl to do? I know someone else’s news”) “It’s not that you regret anything, but you notice the distance,” she says. “It’s just part of getting older.”

A sense that adulthood is a process rather than an endpoint runs throughout the whole of Liquorice. It’s something that’s on Pilbeam’s mind as she thinks about how things might look in the years ahead: “I think I’ll always be a musician and I’ll always make music,” she says. “But doing it to the same level that I’m doing now, I can’t imagine how that’s possible while also maintaining a family and a job. You’d basically need to stop for a few years. And you don’t get maternity leave when you’re a musician.”

For now, at least, making music is compatible with domestic life. Liquorice took shape slowly at home. “To start with, it was very much from me writing demos by myself,” she says. The songs were then expanded with Agius. “He’s basically the other half of this whole project.” For Liquorice the pair enlisted Melina Duterte (Jay Som) to produce before pulling in Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint who provided the record’s atmospheric drums.

They are employed to subtle effect on late album highlight "Part That Bleeds". It is a song which lays Pilbeam’s sweet vocals over an infectious baseline. The star crossed lovers in the song (“we were written as a tragedy” “I’ll write your name on every tree” “You’re the wind, I’m a pile of leaves”) were loosely inspired by the characters in Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, which Pilbeam had recently revisited before writing the song. “I loved the pacing of it [the film]… how nothing huge happens but you still feel everything,” she says.

This collection of songs really does move in that same register: unfolding carefully through moments of nostalgia, or well observed private thoughts, rather than huge declarations. It’s easy, in fact, to imagine these songs soundtracking a silver screen moment of their own. It is something that Pilbeam, who loves cinema, has thought about: “I’ve been told my songs would be good for when the credits roll. Like a coming of age moment, maybe. I’d love it.” She adds with a laugh “And getting your music in films or ads, that’s where the money is really! That’s how most musicians I know actually make it work.”

The cinema of the Hatchie universe is on full display in the video for the album’s second single “Only One Laughing” – a swirling, giddy song brought to life in Melbourne’s colourful Luna Park carnival which casts Hatchie in a classic pop backdrop. Lead single “Lose It Again” pulls from an entirely different place: “It was definitely loosely inspired by Oasis without even meaning to be,” she says. “Those big choruses that just roll and keep going. It’s not really ‘Britpop’ exactly but it has that spirit.” There are also traces of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays in the rhythm and looseness of some tracks on the record, too which she acknowledges. “There’s a bit of that baggy energy in there, which I love.”

It perhaps makes sense then that her audience includes a strong contingent of older male fans who grew up on that stuff. “I know I have lots of like 40- to 50-year-old male fans and I’m not complaining, they’re the ones that buy records! But it is definitely interesting.” You get the sense that she wouldn’t mind if the balance shifted ever so slightly. “I’d love to have more of a younger female fan base, too. I think because my music isn’t quite as poppy as other pop artists… it doesn’t quite resonate with them as much… but please” she adds with a laugh, “tell all your female friends!”

There is no immediate Liquorice tour to invite them to, unfortunately. It’s a decision that is more practical than anything else. “It’s really expensive to tour now,” she says. “You can do it, but you need to be touring all the time to make it sustainable. If you’re not promoting and you’re not selling merch, it’s really tricky because it feels a bit like Jenga… sometimes if one thing moves out of place then the whole thing collapses.”

Instead, she enjoys the idea of the record circulating quietly, finding its way to people over the next few months. “I like that it will be summer here [Australia] and winter there. I want people to live with the album for a while” she says.

Pilbeam seems to have made her peace with the reality of being a modern musician, choosing what is sustainable and living with that compromise. In a way, it perfectly suits the mood of the record itself: being caught in a particular time, low level longing, somehow looking backwards and forwards at the same. Or, as she puts it: “I think I’ll always be someone who wants something more. I guess I’ll always be a yearner.”