Knowing The First Song You Ever Recorded Was 'Something Special'

Few bands have ever written a first song as good as Middle Kids' Edge Of Town. With two distorted chords, lashings of slide guitar, a hollered vocal from Hannah Joy and a sense of ever-building momentum, the 2016 single found the band beginning with a bang, entering the world with a bona fide anthem.

"That was the first song we'd ever recorded," offers Joy, who fronts the Sydney-based trio. "Straight away, we knew it was something special. We'd all been playing music in various forms, separately, before we came together, so we understood immediately that this was the best thing we'd ever done. So, we just fell in line behind it: 'We're a band now, this is what we do.'"

Two years on, and following their self-titled 2017 EP, Middle Kids deliver Lost Friends, their debut LP. Edge Of Town has pride of place on the album, but there's a host of new jams, indie-rock belters filled with unexpected details; from slide guitar to piano, banjo and keyboards to the band's fondness for complex compositions.

"I wanted it to [take] risks with some of the sounds and the songs," Joy says. "There's a few songs where you might think that it's going to keep chugging along in a certain way, but then we switch it up and it changes into something else, in a way that you wouldn't expect. It is indie rock, but there's a lot of bizarre modulations and key changes, and timing things. We wanted to play with forms."

Lost Friends captures Middle Kids at a point where, despite brewing buzz - opening for Ryan Adams, playing on Conan, placed in an episode of Flaked - the band is still "pretty mysterious", no predominant narrative having arisen.

Joy grew up on the North Shore of Sydney, but ended up finishing high school in Annapolis, Maryland, where she lived with friends of her parents. It was the fifth school she'd been to, moving around not because of her parents but her own restlessness. "I felt like I was looking for something, but I wasn't sure what. I've always been a curious person, but also a bit of a wander-y person," she says.

As a kid, she was a musical prodigy: at three, she was found sitting at the piano, trying to work out Pachelbel's Canon. "So, I was put into piano lessons, having lessons multiple times a week for the next 15 years," Joy offers. "It's been the big centrepiece of my life."

Along the way, she recorded an album at 13 ("I actually found it on one of my hard-drives recently. I listened to it, but I couldn't get through it"), and went to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music to study composition and film orchestration. Middle Kids, her first real band, came when she met Tim Fitz, future husband/bandmate. "He said, 'Your voice would sound really good over a guitar,' and that changed everything," Joy recounts. "[Middle Kids] suits my temperament and my voice, because you can just let it all out there. I'm maybe a bit intense. I feel a lot of things. When I sing, I really wanna just throw my voice around and really put my body into it, and my heart into it."

When Edge Of Town was released, the band had never played a show, debuting thereafter at Sydney venue The Oxford Circus. "It was the first time I'd ever played where people knew a song," Joy says. "Sure, they only knew one song, but it was a crazy energy; an energy that you were sharing, together. That was a glimpse of a new experience for us, this future possibility."

As Middle Kids went from never having played to playing all the time - spending seven months on tour last year - they came to revel in that feeling. "People love going to gigs, because there's a really positive energy and you feel like you belong - regardless of who you are and where you come from - amongst this like-minded group of randoms and friends. There's something magical when people come together in a room, especially when everyone's singing... it's one of the only times when there's a group of people who are saying and feeling the exact same thing at the same time. It's amazing to be a part of that."