Now We're A Band

Two years in the making, recorded in lounge rooms in Melbourne, Sydney and Cape Town, Melbourne five-piece Clubfeet have finally released their sophomore album, Heirs And Graces, a powerful mix of '80s new wave synth pop, contemporary indie pop and electronica.

“The blend came naturally, I think,” Clubfeet lead singer and guitarist Sebastian Cohen suggests. “There was never a conscious decision. I think that's just the music that we love, pretty much. It's a combination of that and all of us coming together with our own tastes. We all have that in common, loving that era of music, the aesthetic and everything. But we do love the new dancey stuff, I suppose; which you had back then as well, so I think it's just an extension of the '80s anyway.”

“The kind of record we wanted to make,” adds keyboards player Montgomery Cooper, “[was] something that kind of mixed our love of band music and love of dance music.”

The new album is quite the great leap forward from their first, 2010's Gold On Gold, which, as Cooper tells it, they “made on a whim, in a lounge room, when Seb was staying on our couch for a while and we kind of had a bit of downtime. So we weren't even thinking about that. We made the record and it ended up getting some exposure and kind of doing okay, almost in spite of us and in spite of itself!”

All of which is quite the understatement, considering that first album became something of a subtle hit, picked up for release in the US by seminal New York underground dance label Plant Music after the label discovered the band on a blog. A positive Pitchfork review led to a spate of remixes and a resurgence of interest in the album a year after its original release. And that led to Clubfeet travelling to New York.

“That was the first time that we played live, as the whole band,” Cooper continues. “Like we'd done a few DJ shows and a few stripped-down things, because we were probably being slapdash about it, but in the lead-up to going to the States, we spent a month or two jamming a lot and regularly. So the first ever show we played was in New York at Pianos. We ended up, I think, playing ten shows that week at CMJ. Some of those shows were, like, lunchtime shows to two people, but some of the shows, The Strokes were there, Danger Mouse was there.”

“I feel like we did become a band at CMJ,” adds Cohen.

Expat Australian Victor Van Vugt, whose credits include records for Nick Cave and PJ Harvey among many, mixed the album in New York. “We're old friends with him from other things and he kind of said he wanted to do it,” laughs Cooper, “so when he said he wanted to do it, that meant we were, like, 'that sounds great', because we're pretty limited in what we can do, technically. So it was kind of nice to be able to do all the chaos in recording, make the tracks and send them off to him.

“Some of the last ones we added were the most – not all of them but in a way probably the least, I guess, pop songs, were a bit more deeper and less song-driven because we felt like there were plenty of those moments on the record already and that wasn't our idea of what we wanted to do. We didn't want it to be purely a pop record, even though we're a pop band; like we kind of wanted it to find a balance of our tastes.”

Clubfeet will be playing the following dates:

Friday 8 February - The Star Bar, Echuca VIC
Saturday 9 February - Ding Dong Lounge, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 14 February - Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
Saturday 16 February - Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst NSW
Thursday 21 February - Alhambra Lounge, Fortitude Valley QLD
Friday 22 February - Elsewhere, Gold Coast QLD
Saturday 23 February - Villa Nightclub, Perth WA
Wednesday 27 February - Republic Bar, Hobart TAS
Friday 1 March - Ed Castle, Adelaide SA