Word Of Horse's Mouth

There was a lot going on in music in 2009. Lady Gaga got her first single for Just Dance in January; seminal punks Blink-182 announced they were reforming; Pearl Jam made a completely paradoxical appearance on late-night television; the whole dream pop movement made a return with albums like Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion and The xx's debut album; Susan Boyle does it for all the talented shut-ins out there with I Dreamed A Dream. But also, little homemade studios around the country started popping out bands that would eventually be looped into a rebirth of straightforward Australian garage rock. Eddy Current Suppression Ring had pumped out Primary Colours the year before, after many years of being Melbourne favourites, and subsequently became the forefront what would be a big push of DIY music out of the garages and basement studios and onto the airwaves. In the meantime, two fellow Melbourne ladies formed a band after making the trip from Perth. Despite self-admittedly having no idea how to play their instruments, Super Wild Horses gave it a go anyway, and eventually released a stellar little number in 2010's Fifteen.

Three years have since passed, and the two-piece have just finished up their second – and eagerly awaited – second album, Crosswords. “Yeah, not bad, things are going pretty well,” Hayley McKee says over the phone. “The album just came out today, so we're pretty excited. And uh, yeah, getting ready to play again.” Super Wild Horses, made up of long-time friends McKee and Amy Franz, had a pretty big gap between albums, with the completely down-to-earth sound of Fifteen piquing interest both here and overseas, but the usual day-to-day commitments also popping up. “We feel like we really took a year off last year, kind of, and didn't really play much, just because life got busy,” McKee explains. “But before that we toured America and we did a lot of festivals like Big Day Out and Golden Plains. So the last year we've just worked on bits and pieces and got the demos done for the record. We just wanted to give ourselves enough time to explore music a bit more.”

Part of that exploration took them to the abovementioned festivals, but also as support for a slew of awesome bands, that Super Wild Horses have more than a little in common with; the clear ones being Eddy Current Suppression Ring themselves and San Franciscan non-stop rock machine Thee Oh Sees, but also groups like Best Coast, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Drones and Ty Segall, among others. McKee thankfully shares a passion for those first two bands with this scribe. “Well, you mentioned Thee Oh Sees and Eddy Current Suppression Ring; I mean, those two just channel energy,” she gushes. “That was always inspiring to watch, and still, whenever Thee Oh Sees tour, I still get very excited about the chance to watch them again. They're great bands to watch.” One other, and probably more pertinent, link between Super Wild Horses and Eddy Current… is the fact that Mikey Young of the latter was quick to jump on board and produce Fifteen. “I guess the main thing we get out of Eddy Current… is just the great times, and being able to work with Mikey. The amount of times we've worked with him now, we've got a really good language between us about how we want records and songs to sound.”

So anyway, Crossroads. The new album sees the girls holding the same simple, analogous aesthetic of their previous work up to a harsher light. Much more confident in their songwriting and instrumentive abilities, Crosswords is full to bursting of shoegaze-curbed emotion and heady riffage. The album title itself is a hint to its expanse, and the CD inserts carry that witty idea through, well, crosswords instead of lyrics. “Well I guess the idea was… we like the idea of the name Crosswords, because it represented a lot of things,” McKee explains. “It's a real kind of Sunday wistful term, or it can be taken as two separate words, like 'angry words' or 'cross words', with that whole feeling of the black-and-white of life. There were so many meanings that could be taken for it. We just thought it would be a really fun concept to do little cryptic clues for each song title. Each song had a couple of different ideas at times, so it was a good way for us to get all those ideas into one bit of paper.”

The whole crossword idea ended up being much more a divine thing than McKee and Franz might have expected from the start as well. While the garagey-ness abounds, the scope of Crosswords means that there is a delicate balance between rocky numbers and soft, pensive tracks that fans might not expect. “Part of the reason why it took a little longer for us to record [Crosswords] is because we did have a lot of slow songs, but [the album was] still sort of our garagey, high-energy. So we actually didn't know what to do with it. There was talks at one point of doing a double album: having one album with all the slower stuff, and one album with our normal stuff. And that took us quite a while to get our head around, trying to find that balance. So track listing was pretty tough this time around, trying to figure out how to make the album flow without sounding disjointed. We're both really happy with the light and shade on the record.”

Of course, Crosswords wouldn't be a 'garage' record if it wasn't for the space it was recorded in. Taking a different lean with this album, Super Wild Horses decamped to what would admittedly not be everyone's first choice of studio – an abandoned butter factory. “Yes, we did,” McKee admits with a chuckle. “It used to be a butter factory, and also a candle factory. We met the people who had bought the space, and they had made a little apartment upstairs in the factory. But below was just this huge warehouse space that they were eventually turning into something else. We really wanted that loud, booming sound that only a warehouse can give you, even though it was a lot tougher in terms of basically setting up the studio there. We brought everything down with us. But we love those sort of spaces for the warmth they give records.”

Super Wild Horses will be playing the following dates:

Friday 10 May – GoodGod Small Club, Sydney NSW 
Friday 17 May – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane QLD 
Saturday 25 May – The Bird, Perth WA
Friday 31 May – The Tote, Melbourne VIC