Keeping 'Em Clean

The Stevens only began plying their distinctive brand of scuzzy indie-pop in 2011, after singer-songwriters Alex Macfarlane and Travis MacDonald decided to fight the good fight as a team rather than operate separately. The pair's styles may be distinctive but their songs complement each other well, giving a broad scope to The Stevens' inimitable sound.

“We've both been in a lot of bands but never been the main writer before, so this is like us continuing to record our solo stuff in our bedrooms only now we've got a backing band for it,” Macfarlane smiles. “It's pretty much all written and demoed by us individually – for basically every song on the album there's a bunch of demos with just us recording it in our respective houses. A lot of the tracks on the album were dug up from our old solo projects, and we had a lot of mutual influences so the songs just gelled together pretty well from the start. My songs are a bit wussier – I've got the really girly sounding ones and he's got the more intelligent, acerbic, witty songs.”

The band's debut album A History Of Hygiene churns through 24 songs in roughly 44 minutes, and while much of it was self-recorded in random locales the fact that The Stevens' line-up contains Melbourne indie rock royalty (Macfarlane recently joined Twerps on drums and new bassist Gus Lord plays in Boomgates) makes it unsurprising that uber-producer Mikey Young has his prints all over the studio sections. “We only did ten of the songs on the album with Mikey, and the others were recorded at various homes or rehearsal studios,” Macfarlane explains. “Because the [original line-up of] band started to split up during the recording we had to gather material from a bunch of different places, otherwise we mightn't have had enough. It might sound a bit incoherent to the listener, but I reckon it works in the end. That's the way I've always done my stuff and Trav's always done it that way as well. Because every song has a lot of different influences thrown into it, we've always recorded them in different ways.”

This haphazard approach necessitated the use of a lot of first takes, which in turn informs The Stevens' anxious-sounding aesthetic. “With the places we recorded at – usually someone's house – we were trying not to annoy the neighbours too much, and if we were trying to get takes for 20 songs in a four-hour block then we had no choice but to really smash them out. That 'unsureness' in the first takes is sometimes really good to capture that nervous energy, and then when we play them live it rocks a bit harder because we've had time to tighten them up. I think if we had too much time to practice we'd just sound like some large rock band, like Grinspoon or something.”