Just Jamming

Hamish Rahn and James Ireland – the two dudes whose first halves of their first names make up the band’s title – are pretty chilled out guys. Plenty of musicians would be feeling anxious about the release of their official debut record, but it’s not really something that crosses Rahn’s mind. “[I’m] definitely not anxious. We just got the test pressing today, and it was kind of the moment where it was like, ‘Okay, it’s actually done, thank God.’ I never really thought any of these songs would see the light of day, so for them to have a home, it’s pretty cool. I never wanted to put out an EP, and then Dan from Pilerats approached me and was like, ‘Hey, you got any songs?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I got these songs,’ and he was like, ‘Want to put together an EP?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I wasn’t gonna use them, so if you want to put them out, then cool, it gives me more time to work on new shit.’”

Despite not thinking about or wanting to put together a proper record, it all seemed to come together pretty easily. “There were only a few little things we had to do. We just re-recorded most of them properly instead of just using shitty drum tracks. It all happened pretty quickly when we were actually recording. We just plugged away whenever we had free time and when we had money. I just worked on stuff and James did the mixing and shit.” Accompanying the EP is a recently released video clip for the first single Rahn ever wrote, titled Love, and such is the collective attitude; they simply decided to head down to the beach and see what would happen. “I didn’t have any ideas at all. We just went to the beach and then all that fucking weird shit happened. About halfway through I was like, ‘Oh, imagine if we had girls,’ and then my friends Katie and Sheridan, who are total legends, ended up being co-directors because they were so into it. It all ended up working quite well.”

Perth seems to be churning out talent at an alarming rate these days, and with Hamjam’s EP launch and the annual WAM festival right around the corner, Rahn’s looking forward to partying and enjoying everything that everyone else has to offer. “Aborted Tortoise [EP launch support] are my favourite Perth band. They’re like 18-19 years old and they don’t know anything yet, they just have no idea what the fuck is going on. There’s no pedals, just amps, it’s so, so good... all the bands at WAM are sick [too], everyone’s doing so well. We’re really looking forward to partying with everyone. Our band Gunns is playing at WAM too – we’ve got a 7” coming out in December, which was sorted out before we’d even started working on the EP [for Hamjam], and that’s pretty much done, and I’m basically close to finishing the album, so I want to have that out early next year. Yeah, looking forward to it all.”