Chet Faker

“It wasn't a conscious effort to hold off from releasing the record,” says Faker, talking about why he spent so long doing online only releases. “When I first started I was simply making music and uploading it onto Sound Cloud whenever I finished it. I hadn't actually considered releasing anything until the opportunity came around; at that point I'd just sort of released a whole bunch of music. I put Terms And Conditions out as the first single and that went well, but then radio stations overseas started playing I'm Into You so a lot of people were chasing that one down. Next thing I knew I kind of had two singles going on at the same time which was funny. I dropped the EP as soon as it was ready. This record is my first release ever so I suppose I was bound to do something peculiar.”

During his career to date, Faker has exuded an air of mystery: going under an alias, 'hiding' behind a beard, but the man himself says it was all a bit of an accident.

“It's not so much mystery as it is privacy. It just depends on what angle you look at it. I'm not massively interested in trying to sell my personality as a brand. So initially I didn't put up detailed biographies or information on who I was or where I'd come from. I just wanted to focus on my music and make people look to that for information. On top of that I hadn't been working on the project for long, so there was no backlog of second hand information on the internet, next thing I knew I was being called mysterious. It kind of worked out well, but it certainly wasn't an intentional approach.”

 “I think being from Hobart is actually a massive advantage for us,” Wells counters when proposed with a possible change of scenery in the future. “We have our own rehearsal and writing space and there isn't the rush of a big city down here so you have time and space to write music. The downside is it is expensive to tour, but for the moment we're very happy being based in Hobart and these days I don't think it's completely necessary to be based on the mainland.”

Off the back of their second slot at Falls Festival, Ben Wells & The Middle Names are building on their profile further with the release of their debut EP, a warm and layered affair that showcases Wells as a playful and coloured lyrist.

“With House, Come Home most of the songs had been written and worked on within the band for some months, rather than writing whilst recording,” he explains, “which meant we had explored the songs 100 percent before we recorded them.”

He opens up further, discussing the experiences he thinks have wormed their way into the music. “I had just moved out of home, so they are about the first experiences you have of that freedom of not being under your parent's roof,” Wells says. “I think that's why there is such diversity in the EP musically, because some of those experiences are good and [some] not so much.”