On Gut Feelings, Perfection And Recording A Song Five Times

It always takes a while to become an overnight sensation. To many folks Brisbane quartet Nite Fields seemingly burst from nowhere earlier this year with their accomplished debut long-player, Depersonalisation, but as is so often the case perceptions can be wildly misleading. The band had been slaving away on the album’s nine tracks for four years, recording it themselves in bedrooms, garages and basically any empty space they could get their hands on (these being further spread across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne as members shifted and relocated around the country).

Once the album was completed, they decided to trek though Eastern Europe playing gigs for a few months rather than take the easy option of starting with an Australian tour, but this detour from convention ultimately mattered naught as Depersonalisation was quickly picked up by burgeoning LA indie Felte Records (also home to Aussie bands White Hex and PVT) and started accruing rave reviews in publications and blogs as diverse as Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and The Guardian. As frontman Danny Venzin explains, however, it’s all about gut feel, intuition and making music that excites them as a collective rather than any great master plan for world domination.

"We’re not a commercial band by any means, and we didn’t have that industry ambition"

“We just kept going until we had enough songs that we were ready to put out as an album,” he shrugs. “We never really considered ourselves to be a singles band – most of these songs I don’t really think work alone. Perhaps some of them do, but it was really just a pieced-together effort. I think of this more of a document or a diary of this period, and there was just a point at the end where maybe we had some personality changes and some different things happening in our lives where we just went, ‘Ok, this is enough.’ We could have kept going and writing songs and had 11 or 12 on there, but we probably would have broken up, I think. It was dragging on at the end so we just had to put it out. I was very pedantic with a lot of it – there’s one song on there that we recorded five times. I guess it just took a while until we were happy with it.

“I think we’re a very different band now [compared to when we started the recording]. It’s funny, because I had the record’s theme about halfway through – about two years into it. Most of these songs were written in 2011/2012; it was really the recording process which took a lot of time – it wasn’t the writing process. When I say the recording process we were doing it ourselves, so when I say we recorded a song five times it wasn’t because we went to the studio and we didn’t get it right, it was because we didn’t know how to do it. We’d play it in the room and go, ‘Ok, this sounds awesome’ – me and our bass player recorded most of it – and then we’d go, ‘Oh, this sounds wrong’ or ‘That’s wrong,’ we just couldn’t get it right. We learned how to capture our sound along the way, so it was a learning process for us recording this album.”

Venzin explains that Nite Fields’ ultra-DIY approach wasn’t pre-ordained, just that in their minds there was no real reason for them to do it any other way. The album was predominantly mixed by HTRK’s Nigel Lee-Yang, but that was the only real outside interference.

“I think it was by necessity,” he reflects. “We’re not a commercial band by any means, and we didn’t have that industry ambition – we didn’t send singles to radio, and we haven’t been played on triple j or any of that sort of stuff – so there was no real reason for us to spend thousands of dollars on an expensive studio and a producer. From our first 7” we had the personnel in our band where it just made sense to do it ourselves.

“I think so far with the people we’ve worked with locally they haven’t really ‘got it’, just because what we’re aspiring to is quite different. It’s hard in Brisbane for people to really get it if you’re doing something that’s not conventional. But it’s us too – with our four members we’re all really particular. I’ll hear things in a mix: I might hear a frequency and be like, ‘No, this is totally wrong’ and everyone else will be going, ‘What the fuck are you on about?’ and then I’ll spend three hours trying to get it out. It’s a very obsessive thing; we’re perfectionists and it took so long because we had to get it right, and we found that we had to do it ourselves if it was going to be right.”

The Nite Fields sound is highly stylised – it’s been described as dour and morose, although Venzin himself favours “bleak and inward-looking” – and has been variously compared to work such as The Cure’s early music or even the more downcast side of New Order.

“I think the sound changes – there’s a few filters,” Venzin offers. “I think the main thing is that it needs to sound original and it needs to sound contemporary, and I don’t think that we’ve always managed to do that. I’ve seen some reviews where people say it sounds like ‘80s and ‘90s bands – and fair enough because those influences are there – but there’s something on every song that could only be from the now, whether it’s a piece of equipment or some instrument or some effect. That’s essential. There were some songs where we’d record them and go, ‘No, the guitar sounds too generic’ or, ‘The drum sound has been done a thousand times,’ so we’d go back and do them again. I’m after a feeling, and it’s about chasing that feeling where you go, ‘Wow, that works! That makes me feel a certain way.’ It’s not an intellectual exercise where you set out to tick certain boxes, it’s an artist’s perspective where you’re chasing a feeling. If I feel numb about something I’m not going to put it out, and that’s what took a while too – getting enough content that we were excited about.”

Does it ever get frustrating chasing these intangible feelings and using intuition in search of the perfect take?

“Sure, I mean we might never put another record out if that doesn’t come. We’ve got new songs now, we’re always writing. There’s probably about 40 ideas for Nite Fields songs around, it just took four years because it had to be right. I don’t see the point otherwise – there’s just so much music in the world already, if people are struggling to connect with or feel your music then why would you even bother? Why give them shit? What’s the point? I have to be excited about – I can’t say that it has to be good because that’s subjective, but there has to be something in it otherwise you’re just pissing in the ocean.”

And while a band’s first album is always important, Venzin doesn’t necessarily believe that Depersonalisation is setting any template for future Nite Fields recordings.

"It’s not an intellectual exercise where you set out to tick certain boxes, it’s an artist’s perspective where you’re chasing a feeling"

“I don’t think it’s a big statement – the album to me is more like a big summary of this period of the band. I guess I’m the lyricist, so more of it’s maybe a reflection of my life in those years, so once we put it out I can go, ‘Ok, that’s the book written,’ then I can close that and do something else and live something else and experience something else. Our new stuff has a really different sound, because I had to delve into the theme of this record probably for a lot longer than I would have liked to. But it wasn’t preconceived, like, ‘We’re going to have an album that sounds like this.’ It all happened pretty organically – this was just how we were feeling and the sounds we were making together.

“I think the good thing about being back in Brisbane is that we still feel that nobody gives a shit. We haven’t developed egos or anything like that – we don’t feel any different – which sort of sucks because it would be nice to feel some accomplishment. [Recent events have] sort of been middling for us. It might have been better if we’d done really well where like people were giving us heaps more money to tour or if nobody at all had given a fuck. The way it went pretty much just retains the status quo. Luckily, I think for creativity being here in Brisbane – far away from everything – is fantastic, and while we’re here it will allow us to develop on our own terms, far away from prying eyes and external expectations.” 

In the short term, however, Nite Fields are preparing for their local album tour as well at marvelling at just how much positive traction has already been afforded their first long-player.

“Just having the record out was what we were trying to achieve, and everything above that has been a bonus,” Venzin smiles. “It’s been crazy to be invited to play in far-flung places and written up in big publications – we could never have imagined that happening, especially given the sort of music that we make. The reception so far has been incredible, fingers crossed we can keep it going.”