Darren Cordeux: ‘I Had To Think About Kisschasy In A Different Way’

Darren Cordeux wasn’t sure he’d ever write another Kisschasy song.

“That was a feeling I had since we called it a day [in 2015]; that's kind of why we called it a day,” the singer tells The Music.

After the touring cycle for the band’s third album, 2009’s Seizures, ended, Cordeux got to work on a follow-up, demoing 12 songs for a fourth outing that he presented to his longtime bandmates and their management.

“It just felt almost like Kisschasy being a Kisschasy cover band,” he confesses. “It rang a bit hollow.” In order to preserve what they’d built up until that point and respect their fans, they decided to part ways.

They reunited for Good Things Festival in 2022, playing their acclaimed debut album United Paper People in full, subsequently embarking on a national tour in 2023.

Given the fan response and chemistry within the band, which is as strong as it’s ever been, it only made sense to celebrate their second album, Hymns For The Nonbeliever, with a run of shows across the country, kicking off this Friday in Perth with Sly Withers and Suzi in tow.

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It was while revisiting the band’s earlier material that something clicked into place for Cordeux.

“I feel like most of the time, you don't want to rest on your laurels and you don't want to look back too much… I like to look forward. But I guess out of necessity, I went back and listened to those records and I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”

He realised he’d been putting Kisschasy into a box that it didn’t fit in, and not giving the band enough credit for how eclectic the material could be.

“I just had to think about Kisschasy in a different way,” he says.

“I think I was just putting it in too much of that mid-2000s kind of sound. I remember when we were making those records back then, I was trying to transcend that. Even back then.

“I was like, ‘The song is the most important thing and it's not about so much the aesthetic, it's just more about having this good song that will stand the test of time.’ And then if it's got the right energy, it'll be a Kisschasy song.

“It's still my voice, it's still the band, the same four members, it's all of us playing together, that chemistry is still there. In fact, it's better than it was. So, I think I was stressing too much about trying to appease this imaginary audience.”

The idea of recording new music didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility, but it had been so long since he’d written for Kisschasy.

“When it came time to do new stuff now, at first it was that same feeling, I was like, ‘Oh… do I have to go back into the headspace that I was in when I was doing Kisschasy when I was so much younger? So much life has happened since then, I don't know if I can get back into that headspace.’

“And then when I changed the angle that I was looking at it from, I was like, ‘Okay, well, maybe I can allow some of that growth in as long as I hit certain points musically and lyrically. Then it will still translate as a Kisschasy song.’ When I realised that, it all clicked into place.”

Once he came to that realisation, the floodgates opened, and enough material for a second attempt at album number four materialised within only a few short months at the end of 2024.

“When I opened up those horizons and I started writing different material, I was like, ‘Oh, that could be a Kisschasy song, that could be a Kisschasy song.’ These songs that I wouldn't have thought of, but I was like, ‘All right, if I change the energy of it, that's completely a Kisschasy song. It doesn't have to be this kind of straight underlined thing.’”

The first taste of that material is the band’s first new music in 16 years, Lie To Me, which was released in May.

“Lie To Me is probably the most Kisschasy song out of the new batch of songs, and there is a batch of songs that are there that we've recorded, that we've mixed,” Cordeux confirms.

“We decided on that one being the first single because if we're going to come back after 16 years, we still wanted to show that, ‘Okay, this is the Kisschasy you know and love, with a little bit of new energy.’ The other stuff on the record, you'll see a bit more of that growth.”

Around the same time that fans were getting acquainted with Lie To Me, they were also receiving Hymns For The Nonbeliever on vinyl in the mail, marking its first-ever pressing. The vinyl release saw it shoot to #1 on not only the ARIA Vinyl Albums Chart, but also the Australian Albums Chart.

“It's almost 20 years old, the fact that it could have that kind of impact on any kind of chart is mind-boggling,” he admits. “It's a reassuring feeling. When you put a lot of effort into making sure that the music you put out there is at a certain level of quality, when 20 years later it kind of still matters to some people, it makes you feel good.”

In the liner notes for the vinyl, Cordeux sums up the album perfectly by stating: “Hymns For The Nonbeliever reflects Kisschasy at our most focused, most cohesive and most furious.”

He was proud of the album when it was released, but its significance was cemented over time.

“I think it does hold more significance now,” he reiterates. “I mean, obviously, at the time, you think everything's the best. I remember I felt that distinctly about Seizures. With Hymns, we were in the thick of everything, and everything was happening so quickly. I remember listening back to it in my car and just going, ‘Wow, this is a great album.’

“I wrote Opinions [Won’t Keep You Warm At Night] and Spray On Pants in the same little batch, and I took them to the band at the same time and just played them to them on acoustic guitar, and they looked at each other, like, ‘Fuck. Okay, this is definitely the next level.’

“From the point of view of our label at the time, they definitely put more power behind it, because what happened with United Paper People is it kind of took off in a way that nobody was expecting. When it came to the next record, there was definitely more push behind it.

“The stars aligned; we had the push at the right time from the industry, and then it was just good timing that we happened to be at our best when that was happening as well.”

The album credits proudly display the name of legendary producer Jerry Finn (Green Day, Blink-182), who mixed Opinions Won't Keep You Warm At Night and Spray On Pants, alongside British legend Chris Sheldon, who oversaw the rest of the record.

That connection to Finn came about through Jai Al-Attas, the band’s “quasi-manager”, who was and still is, as Cordeux notes, “always on our page.”

“Chris Sheldon, who produced the record, worked with Foo Fighters, Pixies, and we adored him. He did such a great job on that record. But when it came to the singles, Opinions and Spray On Pants, the label and everybody was like, ‘Well, we need this to have a bit more of that kind of radio sheen.’

“We were like, ‘Well, who should we use?’ Jai was already friends with Jerry. He ended up getting this deal. I think Jerry did it for a thousand bucks; it was so cheap. It was like he just did it because he liked it, and I think he also wanted to do our next record.

“I remember when Chris Sheldon got the news that we were going to remix the singles, he was kind of bummed because it was his baby, and he was like, ‘I don't want to give this up to somebody else.’ But then, when we got the mixes back from Jerry, Chris was just like, ‘Actually, you know what? They sound fucking great.’

“Then I went to the States and was meeting with potential producers for the next record. And actually, it was a little bucket list moment for me, I went out with Jai to lunch with Mark Hoppus and Jerry Finn, and it was just so cool. Jerry was the nicest guy, and we talked about doing the next record, Seizures, with him, and it would've happened, but he sadly passed away.

“That was a devastating thing for the music world as a whole, because he was just the nicest guy and so talented, and it's one of those sliding doors moments. How would that record have turned out if we had used Jerry? Again, very, very stoked that we ended up using Rob Schnapf, and I love that album, but you always think, ‘What if? What would've been made of that record if we had taken a different direction?’

“I'm very proud to have his name on those two songs, and we got to work with an industry legend. He worked on Dookie, which was the album that kind of introduced me to the whole world of ‘90s punk, pop punk, whatever you want to call it, and was the gateway drug for so many people in that world.”

The songs on Hymns For The Nonbeliever have stood the test of time; that much is evident by the flood of comments on socials from new fans who have only just discovered the band in recent years, some of whom thought they’d never get the chance to see Kisschasy live.

“We had a lot of really true fans, and I think with true fans, what they do is they're just like a resounding billboard for you; they go out and they tell their friends, or they have kids, they tell their kids. It's just kind of like there's that word of mouth.

“I also think that there's a whole new generation of bands that are part of that lineage of taking the elements of what we were doing and introducing it to a new audience, and then it's the same thing. When I used to go and buy albums, the first thing I would do is, I would go and look through the liner notes and see who they were influenced by, and then that would inform my taste, and I think that's still happening.

“And that's why, when we go out on tour, as much as I love the bands that we were going on tour with at the time and they're our contemporaries and they're our friends, I think our point is to make sure that we're taking that next generation of artists on tour.

“We want to support them and also make it clear to the audience there's this ongoing lineage of the Australian alternative music that's been there and it's still happening. I think that new crop of artists that are pointing to us has been very informative for the next generation of music fans.”

Now living in the States, Cordeux confirms he’ll be visiting Australia more frequently in the future.

“Yeah, that's definitely the plan. There's going to be more reasons for us to be playing and being present in Australia. What we haven't done in the last few years since we've been active again is more regional shows, which I'd like to do. So, I think that's definitely something that's on the cards.”

And as to what happened to that unreleased fourth Kisschasy album that he demoed all those years ago? Those signed up to the band’s fan club got a taste via a demo called Howling on Christmas Day last year.

“When I first wrote [that album], I was kind of like, ‘Oh, this could be really cool.’ And I sent it to the band and to our management, and when I didn't get the response I wanted, I was a little bit traumatised and put off. I just wrote it off.

“And then what happened was that the hard drives that I demoed it all on just died. I was like, ‘Fuck.’ So that album, the actual files from that album are gone, but Joel has the MP3s, and somehow my parents have it.

“But I will say that I do feel like there's potential for any song that's good enough to find an audience, and that song that got sent to everybody was reworked by a great artist named Jordan Laser, who's a friend of ours, and she put it out.

“She's done a really great job of reworking it, and it's given it a whole new life. I was like, ‘Oh, this sounds like the way it should have been recorded.’ So, the other thing is, you're always writing songs, sometimes you're not the best vessel for those songs.

“I've got just an ever-growing graveyard of material that if I ever decided to kind of go and dig up those corpses, I'm sure I could make a record, but I'd have to have the incentive to do so, and I'd have to have some pretty bad writer's block to go back that far.”

Touching on the new material he wrote last year, Cordeux notes: “It was important for me not to grab anything that had been sitting there in the past because it's just not the way we've made albums.

“I wanted it to be representative of us right now.”