On Knowing When To Paint The Last Stroke

If you headed along to Groovin The Moo recently you hopefully caught Hermitude’s massive set; no one can deny their awesome live power. On looking out and seeing a field packed with pumped-up kids bouncing, El Gusto (aka Angus Stuart) extols, “I mean, that’s the perks of the job really, isn’t it? Seeing people having extreme amounts of fun to your music, or to your art or whatever – it’s a blessing and a great feeling, you know? You feel like you’re actually giving to people, which is really cool.” Experiencing Speak Of The Devil live within a festival crowd is something that should be on every music lover’s bucket list. “DANCE! DANCE! DANCE! DANCE!” the song demands and all obey. When this is pointed out to Stuart, he shares, “It was so fun making that song that I feel like it couldn’t have not come through to the listener.”

Unsurprisingly, Hermitude “got a bunch of syncs on that song; a few car ads”. Were there any crazy ones that the guys just weren’t feeling and therefore declined? “I think maybe one came through for a cigarette company; they wanted to do a bunch of advertising in Asia – we’re just not really down with promoting cigarettes so we said ‘no’.”

"$30,000 is a sizeable amount of money, but it goes pretty quickly when you’re putting a record together"

They’ve been making music under the Hermitude moniker for 12 years now and Stuart admits, “Yeah, it is crazy”. “Me and Luke [Dubber, aka Luke Dubs] have known each other for longer than we’ve been doing Hermitude, and we played in bands together when we were growing up and stuff, so we’re kinda just like brothers.” On the changes they’ve noticed since Hermitude’s beginnings, Stuart offers, “The music industry is always changing and it’s changed so much – from obviously 20 years ago and ten years ago even – but one of the benefits I feel is that direct connection between you and your fanbase, you know: it’s kind of way more personal now.”

Flume remixed the title track from HyperParadise – the same album Speak Of The Devil lives on – about which Stuart praises: “That’s, like, a really big tune obviously and it opened a lot of people’s ears up to Hermitude. So there was definitely a lot of people that have come to see us initially because of the Flume remix and then they’ve gone on to listen to some of our other stuff and gone, ‘Oh! I actually really like these guys’, and they come down to shows. So, it’s pretty amazing to see the follow-on effect from that remix.” 

The outfit’s HyperParadise record received an AIR Award for Best Electronic Album and also took home 2012’s Australian Music Prize. “The AMP money was fantastic,” Stuart acknowledges. “It was there to basically put back into Hermitude and create this next record. And, yeah, $30,000 is a sizeable amount of money, but it goes pretty quickly when you’re putting a record together.

“[Dark Night Sweet Light] is album number five, we’ve done two EPs as well so [this is our] seventh release.” When asked if it’s hard to know when to stop tweaking an album, Stuart muses, “Yeah, it’s like that classic kind of, ‘When is the painting finished?’ you know, ‘When is the last brush stroke?’”

"Seeing people having extreme amounts of fun to your music, or to your art or whatever – it’s a blessing and a great feeling, you know?"

Hermitude recruited some quality guests such as Klo and Yeo to feature on Dark Night Sweet Light. “We found Klo on the internet, on SoundCloud,” Stuart explains. “Chloe [Kaul] is the singer [of electronic duo Klo] and we loved her voice and her style and stuff so we just hit her up and we flew her up to Sydney. And we sort of had written lyrics and melodies and stuff and she was into the song and so, yeah! We just had a really fun session with her.” The resulting track, Hazy Love, is a wonderfully lazy heat haze (as the title suggests). Stuart and Dubber reached out to Klo via their SoundCloud page. “Oh, man, it’s crazy,” Stuart allows. “I mean, everyone’s so connected; you can go onto any of those social outlets and find something amazing and quite often you can just get in contact with [the artist].”

Yeo was “a recommendation from our publishing, Sony” and Hermitude worked with him differently. “Interestingly enough, we already had a chorus track down on [Searchlight] that we had worked [on] with another songwriter and unfortunately things kinda went pear-shaped. I’m not gonna mention any names… So we actually had to re-imagine the song, right? And that’s how we ended up sending it down to Yeo. And it’s really hard to – once you’ve kinda got something that you’re happy with and then it all falls apart – then re-imagine the song. Again. It was a new experience.” Hermitude didn’t interfere, instead waiting to “hear what comes back”. “And we really, really dug what he did and it was kinda like, ‘Oh, this is heaps better’,” he gushes. 

Hermitude are clearly on a winning streak and Stuart is frothing. “Obviously HyperParadise has done really big things for us and now, you know, Hermitude is as healthy as it’s ever been – it’s just great.”