Pop Purge

Regurgitator

Quan Yeomans and Ben Ely have, against all odds, become one of the most loved songwriting duos Australia has ever produced. Kick-starting their career with hard, acerbic rock mixed with hip hop diatribes and vitriolic delight, the band continue to be an amorphous entity of hook-laden invention and sustained glee. In fact there's only been the one constant – unpredictability. Yeomans happily admits that the intention has always been to do whatever the fuck he wants, and on eighth album, Dirty Pop Fantasy, this idea has been magnified.

“For this record the only directive that we had was to really throw people around, really jerk them from one genre to the next, and I think we've been pretty successful on that front,” Yeomans explains. “We have done that in the past but we really wanted to push it to ridiculous ends. That was the only aesthetic decision we made about the record. Ben actually came over and stayed with me for a while (Yeomans now lives in Hong Kong) in this nine-storey Chinese walk-up in Sai Kung, stuck in this yoga studio together, which was like share house living in one giant room with only a curtain between us. That went on for four weeks, writing and jamming together, then we recorded a few songs, then we moved to Melbourne and did some guitar tracks at Ben's house, vocal tracks at my house, and went on like that.”

Yeomans admits the chemistry between Ely and himself is unique, making the process seem easy at least to them.

“When we are looking for balance in our records it's more about 'do we have enough of this genre there?' Our consistency is our inconsistency – the more inconsistent we can be the more fun it can be for us; the jerkier we can make the musical changes the more we jerk around the audience. For this, I did write a few straight-up guitar pop songs – Fuck You Sweetness was one of the first that I came up with – and when we went into the studio it was We Love You! and Fucking Up, very standard rock songs, very down-the-line kind of tunes. The thing is, I can look at that and think I've gotten that out of the system and move elsewhere. It's more of, like, a checklist for us, playing until we have our fill then looking for something else to play with.”

This propensity for eschewing favoured genres for others rather than tightening what's been working is something that's been creeping into a lot of bands' modus operandi of late, but unlike Regurgitator, it all seems disingenuous. On Dirty Pop Fantasy the band never sit still, never play safe, never pander to past or future fans – each song is a fleeting glimpse of something tangible and relatable before being whisked off to another sound at odds with the last. Yeomans admits they tread a fine line between authenticity and novelty, but again it comes down to one thing.

“Not giving a fuck. It does feel like that, that a song is like a view into another dimension. We have been around for a lot of the eras that these genres have either started or reignited. We grew up listening to all this stuff, and now it's about picking the best things out of what we grew up with and continue to hear. We want to emulate every genre and have fun with it at the same time.”

The album title, Dirty Pop Fantasy, lends itself further to this idea that Regurgitator has crafted a bizarre playlist of their favourite pop songs that never existed. The band have always crafted music by inverting it. One song in particular, Home Alone Stoned, stands out. Its touchstone? Being stoned listening to hair rock. “I mean, [the band] Asia was a big influence for Home Alone Stoned, which is at odds with everything else on the album. Ben and I love that movie The Forty Year Old Virgin, we pretty much watched it back to back multiple times a few years ago. It's been a pretty big influence. Ben bonded with this guy when he came to Hong Kong; they would get stoned in the studio and make these hour-long YouTube playlists of the sappiest '80s ballads as they could, and there was a lot of Journey on there. I think it's seeped into the band – you might see more of those in future.”

At the end of the day, though, despite the constant skewering of popular music conventions, Yeomans openly loves the form. “I have always loved pop music; I pore over it, it's a hobby of mine. The best songs are irresistible, even if they are quite clinical when broken down into their parts. Pop music is superficial in a lot of ways of course, but there is a shift where the lyrical content can be quite strong, whether it is cleverly jarring or confrontational, confessional in a real way. Stimulation is key with pop music – my goal is to use its everyday clicheness to draw people in then twist their minds a little with a different form of content inside. There is this explosive litany that's repetitive and addictive, it's short, it's kind of simple yet easy to digest, and can have this really emotional impact. As I get older I'm a little less addicted to it as I used to be, and there is this pressure to produce something more drawn out and quieter, like a graphic novel or a suite of music, but pop is so intrinsic and ingrained and easy – I think I'll be doing this for a long time to come.”