To Infinity And Beyond

For a brief period, it seemed like Chance Waters was at risk of turning into Australian hip hop's Axl Rose. Following up his promising debut album Inkstains (released under his old moniker Phatchance in 2009), the MC seemed to be reaching for a particularly dangerous and obsessive kind of perfection. Still, after a series of increasingly ambitious singles and minor delays, he's finally managed to deliver Infinity.

“It's taken a long time, yeah,” Waters laughs. “Ironically, it's taken less time than my debut album Inkstains but people have been hassling me way more about how long it's taken. I basically just wanted to get things absolutely right. I spent such a long time improving at my art and learning the process that I wanted to use when I constructed songs and getting my writing to where I wanted it to be. There was a lot of stuff that was cut from the album that didn't make the final copy and there was a lot of stuff that went through a lot of re-envisaging and multiple re-records just to get it where I wanted,” the MC explains. “So, yeah, it's been a very long and complicated process but, at the same time, I think it's taken just the right amount of time. The long run-up has let a lot of interest build and people seem genuinely excited for it.”

To his credit, it's everything he hoped it would be. A far cry from the more straight-laced hip hop of his debut album and even the experimentation of his 2011 acoustic EPs, Infinity is a polished and eclectic work as expansive and all-encompassing as its namesake; effortlessly blending in elements of folk, pop, rock and singer-songwriter aesthetics into his hip hop sound.

“I feel like hip hop, especially in Australia, is no longer in a genre hole. If you actually look at what's going on, there's an exceptionally broad variety of genres involved,” Waters reflects. “For me, I'm not necessarily trying to be a rapper. Rap just happens to be what I'm probably best at out of all the stuff that I do. For me, what I'm really trying to be is a songwriter. That's really my focus. You know, I don't like the idea of sticking a square peg in a round hole. If I don't think a song works particularly well with a hip hop feel, I'll take it in another direction, then I just won't make it sound particularly hip hop,” he says. “Inkstains, I was definitely still in that hip hop vein but, with this album… You know, there are songs on this album that barely even have any drums. I've realised you can take anything and turn it into a nice song.”

In a particularly inspiring turn of events, Waters' ambitions seem to have paid off. The slew of singles drawn from Infinity have all been well-received both commercially and critically (Bertie Blackman collaboration Young & Dumb was recently the highest charting Australian hip hop song on iTunes earlier this week) and he's just been nominated for a triple j Unearthed J Award.

“Yeah, I've been having this thing where every day I just keep getting amazing news. You know, for three years, I didn't really get any amazing news at all – and now, every single day, somebody calls me with some new thing that has never happened to me before,” the MC laughs. “So, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm in a coma somewhere and this is all just some vague dream I'm having in a hospital bed.”