United As One

Teenage dreams in Sydney’s inner west are a dime a dozen. The low ebbing energy of young guys and gals longing to take off for bigger and brighter things hums beneath every town, and it was especially true for Nick Bryant-Smith, aka MC Solo from hip hop duo Horrorshow, and his gang of equally determined mates.

Drunken raps, MC battles at house parties and hanging around the ‘burbs is how Australian hip hop heavyweights Horrorshow, Spit Syndicate, Jackie Onassis and Joyride all came to be. School friends Bryant-Smith and Adit Gauchan (Horrorshow), Raph Zarkov and Kai Tan (Jackie Onassis) and Nick Lupi befriended Rowan Dix (Joyride) and Jimmy Nice (who later formed Spit Syndicate with Lupi), and let the good times roll, often, forming the foundations of each project.

As a collective, the guys cleared their hectic schedules and made good on their former carefree days with Mainline, an LP that fuses schoolyard dreams with invaluable industry know-how under the banner of One Day. To Bryant-Smith, One Day ain’t a ‘supergroup’; it’s a collaboration in the true sense.

"It really feels like a true collaboration, it doesn’t feel forced."

“The album is a middle point between the different sounds and approaches of the different groups,” Bryant-Smith explains. “I don’t know if it was a conscious thing. I mean Raph, Adit and Joyride did a lot of the production – they were originally working on the beats so you’re mixing their flavours right from the get-go. As far as what we wanted to write about, we wanted to bring bits and pieces of everyone’s styles to the table. Not until we got the album back and listened to it [did we realise] we had arrived at One Day’s sound, whatever that is.

“That’s one of the great things about the record – it really feels like a true collaboration, it doesn’t feel forced. It feels like a true reflection of all those individuals in one cohesive thing.”

One Day has capitalised on each group’s unique flavour, gifting Mainline a multifaceted sound, with lauded single Love You Less the album flag bearer. Bryant-Smith had no trouble enticing the boys to record the album in the beachside settings of Byron Bay and La Perouse, but clearing a gap in everyone’s books was a key hurdle.

“It was a real challenge,” Bryant-Smith admits, “having seven people and four different groups who are all busy in their own right. Basically we just locked off some time in people’s schedules. Last year me and Adit finished up our Horrorshow tour and the last show of the tour was in Byron Bay. What started out as an idea to go to the beach for a little bit snowballed into the whole crew coming up to meet us. So we rented a beach house in Byron that some of us had stayed at before. We hired it out for a week, all the boys came up and they bought studio gear, and we just set up and got started. So that initial seven-day period is where a lot of the songs were born and where people brought ideas to the table. And then later on after all the writing had been finished we did the same thing here in Sydney. That’s how we’ve gotten around it, just really far in advance finding a time that could work for everyone and locking everyone down so we could maximise our time together.”

Having been friends for so long, big opinions and light stoushes were inevitable in crafting an album that draws on all seven guys’ skill, spirit and sound. But how do you ensure everyone gets their say?

“It’s a good question,” Solo laughs. “There’s obviously a lot of chefs in this particular kitchen and we’re all very strong-minded and have strong opinions about what we do. I guess we’re all used to working with one or two other people in our respective projects, or even someone like Joyride who just does it all himself. So it is a big shift going from that to working with seven people and juggling different sets of opinions.

“Sometimes we’ve had blow-ups but I think that’s natural for friends who have known each other for ten or more years. We’re all thick as thieves and if we do have a squabble it’s kind of in the same way brothers do, you know. We don’t really lose sight of the end goal of why we’re doing this and how lucky we are to be able to do it together.”