"When you’re working on something new, you should really be hoping to make something better, not just trying to make something maybe just as good.”

When you work with new producers you get tons and tons of new ideas. You get to steal all their best ideas. It felt like we had a pretty firm idea of how we wanted to make the (Lex Hives) record.

“Australia is our final tour before we head back to the UK and start writing again. At this stage, we’re hoping to get an album out there by Spring 2013, but nothing has been planned.”

“I feel like maybe there might be a case for pulling together a band. I don’t see that many dance acts that I like that pull off a live band."

“I hope that it’s a reflection that I’m growing up a little bit, that I’m getting over myself a little bit."

"In some ways we weren’t ready for it, in some ways we were – all we can really do is try to control things, to make it about the music and not anything else.”

"I think I needed to have a break from that vibe when I did – I mean, four years, off and on, of having different band line-ups and stuff."

"For The Hives, the bar has to be set very high when we go out jumping. We only aim for the world record. We don’t really go out jumping for fun.”

"I don’t know if we’ll be playing any new stuff besides the last record, but you never know. Maybe we’ll decide that we wanna play a bunch of weird new music and cover songs. I don’t know, we’ll see.”

"And I said, ‘None of these songs are about you,’ which was pretty embarrassing, but I had to say it ‘cause she was wound up about it and I just thought, ‘You’re getting wound up over nothing,’ hahaha."

“This is the first tour we’ve done without the orchestra; we’ve been touring with them for almost a year. It is great, but it’s also great to go back to this, because there’s a lot of communication that is impossible to have when you have thirteen people on stage."

"The eldest in the band is 24, so we might as well just smash it now while we’re young,” he smiles. “I don’t think we ever sat down and thought to ourselves that it wasn’t going to happen, you know?"

“I’ll always believe in following your dreams because it happened to me. As I was saying before, it’s a constant battle; there’s lots of work, then lots more work – it’s a big thing... I’m really bloody fortunate to be doing it and I’m so excited to have this record out.”

“There’s this whole illusion and people think that if a band have a song on triple j they’re pretty much a rock star and they own houses and jet skis, and they’ll never have to lift a finger again... But that’s a real myth."

"I hope that up-and-coming artists respect the roots of the culture and pioneers like Def Wish [Cast] and pay their respects to their elders, and appreciate hip hop as a culture and not just rap music. You know what I mean, all the elements, like we did growing up: graffiti, b-boying, DJing – respect all the other elements as well."

“I lived in Amsterdam for a little bit... and I was walking round the red light district and some other places and it was late at night and just the look in people’s eyes… There are so many stories."

“We went through a lot of arguments as to what was going to be on it... there were about 30 tracks that could have been on it. They limited me to 11 songs."

"Being a bit older, knowing myself a bit more, being more confident in myself, I feel like I’m able to back up all my arguments, all my ideas. I feel like I can do whatever I want."

“It’s kind of like childbirth,” an expecting Lisa Mitchell tells Dave Drayton about album number two, Bless This Mess.

“Oh, I actually had a dream about a certain celebrity. She came to me and she was wearing a yellow blouse, and I was in love with her in my dream. I woke up and um, yeah! That went in the song.”