Shouse: "It Will Be The First Time We've Actually Played At Home Since We Started Out"

In late 2017, a Melbourne duo named Shouse recorded a track that went viral, Love Tonight. They released it via local label Hell Beach (a sub-imprint of Australia's ubiquitous dance-music crew ONELOVE). 

The song didn’t do crazy numbers in 2017 – it blew up last year. Love Tonight charted in over 50 different countries’ Viral 50, a Spotify list that tracks streaming successes worldwide. The tune made it to the likes of the UK, USA, Mexico, Germany, France, Israel and beyond. It sat at #18 on the Global Shazam Chart and placed firmly in Spotify’s Top 200 streaming chart.

Shouse are no one-hit-wonder. Sure, it’s easy to assume that they are based on Love Tonight, but the Melbourne electronic music duo have far more to offer.

Jack Madin says that he felt instant chemistry with his musical other half, Ed Service, which was vital in developing their sound. “Our friendship grew out of making music together. We met, and then the making of the song, in the very beginning, helped to bond us together. And now we're really good friends, best friends for life.”

Service concurs, “we knew each other through the Melbourne music scene. And then, we had a really great night, just talking in a nightclub. Talking intensely about music together,” he shares.

Shouse returned in 2022 with two bangers: Won’t Forget You and Never Let You Go. The former was recorded with a choir of over 50 friends and colleagues between trips to Europe and a thrilling performance at the Sydney Opera House. Won’t Forget You is dedicated to the duo’s nearest and dearest, who happen to contribute to the track.

“Our best friends were all part of the choir,” Madin smiles, recalling the interesting time between Love Tonight and new music – Shouse didn’t realise so many people would care about their music. “The gap between doing Love Tonight, stopping for a while and getting jobs, and then the COVID pandemic, and then finally kind of coming back and celebrating was, you know, an enormous gap.”

Shouse will perform Won’t Forget You with their Melbourne choir of mates this weekend at Meredith Festival. “We’re going to sing with them at Meredith – Won’t Forget You is a song dedicated to all the friendships, particularly those that have been paused or passed during COVID, and we hope to be a catalyst or force for continuing to bring people together in musical friendship, love, and communal experiences. We’re very lucky to be able to play that role at the moment,” Service says.

In case you haven’t noticed, Shouse make music for a reason bigger than playlisting and going viral – they create art to build their Communitas – “Communitas allows us to experience the full joys of being with people, sharing experiences, singing and dancing, living in a community” – an idea expressed by the musical group and Elizabeth Grosz’ Chaos, Territory, Art; Thomas Turinos’ Music And Social Life and Victor & Edith Turner's The Ritual Process & Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. 

“We are really engaged with pursuing that sort of message, this message of Communitas, which is what we call our sort of combined group, cultural community coming together through music,” Madin says. As a school teacher, his job became entirely digitalised, and he needed music to get through the darkness of lockdowns.

“This song with a big choir and this anthemic chorus could come across as dorky and cheesy,” Madin adds about Won’t Forget You, but he and Service didn’t care about the possible cheese factor when the song was resonating with people.

“Meredith Festival is one of the most elevated moments of communities that our music community has,” Service notes. “It's not corporate; it's not commercial, we played hundreds of festivals around the world in the last year or two, and it's still the purest, most beautiful festival I've ever been to.”

Speaking of Meredith, Service and Madin have something special planned for the punters. Shouse are playing a brand-new, not-yet-released song, and they want you to know the words before they play it. Get ready to sing this line: “when you call out my name, I will run to you again”.

“Just to give a bit more context about Meredith – it's our first live show in Victoria after years of DJing and the last year of DJing around the world in 40 different countries. So, this gig means a lot.

“It will be the first time we've actually played at home since we started out at 18 years old. We're gonna have a 30-piece choir, and I’m bringing all these interesting, wacky homemade instruments that Jack’s dad made. It’s going to be a huge party at 1 am on Friday night!” the duo laugh – they want the biggest choir ever to sing on the currently unreleased new track.

Audiences will also hear the latest Shouse song, a remixed version of Won’t Forget You entitled Never Let You Go, which features vocals from R&B icon Jason Derulo, a surreal experience for the electronic music group. “We were in Bulgaria, and I got a message on Instagram from Jason,” Service admits with a laugh, recalling that he thought the message and subsequent phone calls were sophisticated pranks.

“Ten minutes later, Jason Derulo and his crew are calling me, and he was saying, ‘hey, bro; I’m in Ibiza, and we’re having a party.’ He says, ‘We keep hearing your music everywhere; I love your style. I love Won’t Forget You and Love Tonight. We’re going into the studio tonight. Can you send me the stems to Won’t Forget You?’ I was like, sure, you don’t say no to Jason Derulo!”

And so, Never Let You Go was born. “It was a very easy, positive process. Jason really loves the magic that the choir gives the song. He talks about his spine-tingling and the energy of the shows when he plays the song,” Service adds. Madin notes the “levels of bizarreness” involved in the collaboration.

“Creating this link between a small, old little community choir recorded in Brunswick in a kind of ramshackle studio with a top echelon pop star is amazing,” Madin smiles. The absurdity of the situation is part of why Shouse love Never Let You Go so much. “It's nice to be able to make songs and put them on the radio, but we're not desperate for more and more collaborations and massive hits.

“We love that he just hit us up on Instagram, and then it was easy. You know, these crazy experiences keep popping up for us, and we will keep biting at the apple, I think,” Madin says. Service concurs, “Hopefully, we can use [the song] to promote this concept of communitas and communicate something special about the Melbourne music community.”

So, what will Shouse get up to in 2023? There’s new music – “We worked on a track with David Guetta in LA, and that’ll come out next year. We’ve been working with the London House Gospel Choir and recorded a track with them that'll come out sometime next year. We're working on a record,” Service shares, but that’s not all: there are far more personal, life-changing experiences taking place in the lives of Jack Madin and Ed Service. Madin is preparing to become a father, and Service is getting married in his native New Zealand.

Beyond releasing music and personal lives changing immensely, the duo have an embryonic idea of opening a school for communities, combining early childhood, music and arts. Service explains: “We want a space to develop a methodology of collaborative music, making art and start with children, but work and extend to multi-generational experiences and collaborations together in the city,” he says.

He adds, “We really hope for it to develop into something that helps redefine the purpose of art and music in our society, in our city, and create space for music outside of the Royals of the industry and market-driven capitalism driven imperatives. Jack is the primary school music teacher, and I helped develop the Collingwood Yards Arts Precinct – I’ve studied urban planning. The idea is a mixture of all these passions and ideologies.”

Madin wants the space to be a place you can come and have fun. “Kids and adults can come for something that it’s an economic purpose; that’s why schools are beautiful,” he starts. “I love schools because they're these weird little realms outside the hustle and bustle.

“There’s none of these weird mentalities of, you know, even when you start high school, you start to hear, ‘what job are you gonna do?’ and think about your future. Primary schools are gorgeous places for fun, learning and mucking around. We would love to be able to work towards a place like that where you can come for a weeknight choir.”

Shouse will perform at Meredith Festival in Victoria alongside Yothu Yindi, Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten, Dry Cleaning, Tasman Keith, Tkay Maidza, Big Wett, and many more. The event is sold-out. Get ready to sing along: “when you call out my name, I will run to you again”.