Everything Starts By Finding The Details, And Ends In A Visceral Release

Singer, guitarist and founding member of The Kill Devil Hills, Brendon Humphries, is currently prepping to hit the road for a national tour in support of the band's fourth album In On Under Near Water, which he describes as, "a sonically redolent bouquet of angsty noise".

Though the line-up has changed over the years, Humphries has been pedalling blistering blues and back-country rock with The Kill Devil Hills and a swagger for more than a decade now - something he achieved by "consistently [failing] to heed the cries of 'stop!', 'retire now!' and 'silence!'." 

The Kill Devil Hills unique "harsh discordant mixture of sounds", or the very definition of a cacophony, is an Australian institution at this point. If you've never found yourself half-cut in someone's kitchen at an unreasonable hour and howling one of their tracks at the pealing stucco like a mad dog at the moon, then you don't know what you're missing (Drinking Too Much is our personal karaoke selection here at The Music).

So a new full-length - the studio follow-up to 2009's Man, You Should Explode - is an exciting prospect, and not just for late night howlers. Humphries says that working on the album has been one of the highlights of his career. "Making the new record has been my most enjoyed experience," he says. "I love the whole writing, recording, mixing process very much." He goes so far as to say that it's an experience that's only been matched by "touring around Europe a couple of times". An understandable exception considering it's something that he "rates as the most fun, exhausting, ape-pack experience for me, a Kon-Tiki tour devised by Satan."

So what's the better part of the process, creating an album or driving it 'round the world? "They're both yin and yang I reckon," Humphries muses. "The insularity of writing, recording, mixing is pretty much my favourite thing to do - finding the details inside something. Playing live is often a very big release, a kind of raw energy outpouring, a visceral way to connect the music to others directly."

Whether or not the writing is really all that insular, Humphries cites "Animal field recordings (they make music too), singing gospel tunes with my girlfriend (she's got the greatest voice) and film soundtracks" as sources of inspiration - In On Under Near Water pulses undeniably with tightly packed kinetic energy and their ability send it whipping through a live crowd is something that anyone who has seen the group live in the past will happily testify to - and it likely won't be quite so long between outings this time either. The energy is up and Humphries says there should be  "more of that cacophony stuff" coming down the pipeline, with The Kill Devil Hills "hopefully getting a bunch of new material together for recording again soon".

Humphries suggests you see them this time around though, just in case. "You may get hit by a bus or an amateur skydiver tomorrow," he warns. "Embrace us like an old flame and you may just get lucky."