Their Next Album Should Be More "Organic"

The synth-popsters from Nelson are currently touring North America, with Nott preparing for a gig tonight in Philadelphia – and he sounds exhausted. Nonetheless, the muso is anticipating performing at GTM; in fact, he once attended the Bendigo event as a punter. “I was living in Melbourne and me and my brother decided to go,” Nott says.

Georgia was fronting another band, The Peasants, when in 2011 she met producer Joel Little – he was a judge at Smokefreerockquest, which they’d trumped. She, and later Caleb, started collaborating with him. The Notts, who discovered electro-pop via Oh Land, developed Broods. Meanwhile, Little would also record with a NZ progeny known as Lorde.

Broods, now attracting international record deals, first generated buzz with the epic Bridges, ahead of their eponymous Little-guided EP. Their debut album Evergreen cracked the US Top 50 (and ARIA Top 5). Broods most recently aired the single Four Walls – yet the laconic Nott is unsure if there will be another from their debut. “It’s kinda strange talking about [Evergreen] since I’m in the middle of working through the second one already – it seems like years ago that we wrote that,” he admits. “But I guess I look back on it and I don’t hate any of the songs – even though I’ve played them every single night – which I think is pretty positive for an artist.” Following The Naked & Famous, Broods have had their tracks synced for US TV shows like Revenge. “Georgia was pretty stoked – she ticked off one of her life goals of getting a song [the aptly-entitled Medicine] on Grey’s Anatomy,” Nott says.

He freely drops hints about Broods’ second album. “I think there’s gonna be a little more of real instrumentation on it, so a little bit more of playing and stuff, rather than just programming things on the computer – so it’ll have maybe a little bit more of an organic feel to it, but still Broods-vibing. I don’t know. We’ll see. It’s in early stages.”

These days Little is in-demand as a producer – so much so that he’s relocated to California. (He’s teamed with Daniel Johns on his avant-soul Aerial Love EP.) Will Broods reunite with him? “I still really love working with Joel – I mean, he’s taught me everything that I can do now,” Notts laughs. “You always wanna learn. I think it won’t be a record that’s exclusively with Joel, this one, but he will definitely have features on it. We’re just experimenting with writing with other people and seeing what relationships blossom into good music. So we’ll write some really crappy songs and then we’ll hopefully write some more good ones.” And there’s a good chance that fans will hear fresh Broods at GTM. “There’s one song that I really wanna finish and play for you guys at the festival so, depending whether I can finish it or not, yeah, we’ll see.”