TRACK BY TRACK: Aus Alt-Rock Icons Unleash New Electro-Punk EP As Trim Reaper

A new Australian electro-punk duo is in town: Trim Reaper. Made up of Michael Hardy - known from his stints drumming for Birds Of Tokyo, Violent Soho, and Miiesha - and I Heart Hiroshima’s guitarist Matthew Somers, the duo have just dropped their debut EP: listen to Trim Reaper.

Described by the pair as “a small collection of songs, intentionally created in the rawest form”, the EP is home to only three tracks - Modest Salary and Release Love, which have both already dropped as singles, and a brand-new collaboration with indie-pop artist Yb., titled Super Hans. 

Trim Reaper took a very DIY approach to the EP, recording, producing and mixing everything themselves in Hardy’s Brisbane studio. listen to Trim Reaper was born from a series of 4-track cassette jams, recorded in the early months of 2020, and these raw sessions were later sampled and layered to become the blueprint of the EP. 

“We wanted to bring people in with something that shows our truest self, not masking our obscurities and quirks with fancy production and expensive mixes,” the band said. “A lot of the process of creating these tracks was the journey of learning to trust our ability, and the realisation that we have something special to offer to the world, which is something that can be hard to navigate in a time when the music market is unequivocally over-saturated with releases. “listen to Trim Reaper is for the luck-trodden, hard working, big hearted humans who walk towards a fair future for all. We’re proud of this project, ecstatic for the future and hungry to prove what we have to offer.”

To celebrate the release of their debut EP, Trim Reaper are taking The Music track by track through listen to Trim Reaper, in their own words.

‘LISTEN TO TRIM REAPER’ TRACK BY TRACK

Modest Salary

This track was kind of the first thing we created where we realised we knew what we wanted to sound like. We’d discovered a formula for writing and producing music as a two piece.

The song was the unmasking of Trim Reaper. We both knew that we had to head in this direction and it made perfect sense, because all we did was bring more of both of our natural angles to writing and playing and it worked better than ever.

As always, we started it on a 4 track tape machine. The intro riff and drum machine that you hear at the start is a raw print of the tape and we built a song around it. It’s a tongue-in-cheek take on how fucked it is to afford anything these days, and essentially a response to the “just get a better job” crowd - the increasing difficulty of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps”.

Release Love

This was a journey for us. It nearly ended up in the bin a couple of times because of the complexity of the production and arrangement. Glad we fought for it, it’s a real special one and I’m sure we’ll be playing it live for many years to come.

The lyrics and themes of love and freedom from oppression started with stream-of-consciousness singing while trying to work out vocals. We wanted to keep the message open and positive to try and open more people up to the human side of many ongoing issues, and we were incredibly fortunate to gain permission from Gaza poet Mohammed Moussa to use his words for the opening of this track. 

Super Hans ft. Yb.

We made Super Hans in a few hours and had a pretty well constructed song when we left the studio. Most of the instrumentation you hear is from an improvised jam. We chopped it up, added drums and vocals. Mikey had this song on his hard drive from a co-write he’d done with Yb. and it had a rap at the end of it. We sped it up and dragged it into the track - it had this magic natural flow to it and really tied the whole thing together perfectly. We called Yb. and got him in the next day to re-record the rap and chuck some other joyous vocal chaos throughout.

Fun fact about this song is that when we first started playing together a few years ago, Matt initially wanted to do a project where he didn’t sing but just played guitar, and this is the first song he’s ever recorded where he sings and doesn’t play guitar. Proof that everyone can grow? We’ll see. 

The track ended up being a sort of call to action - of course there’s no shortage of those - but hopefully this is also an uplifting one. Who doesn’t wanna get pumped up?

Trim Reaper’s debut EP ‘listen to Trim Reaper’ is out now. To celebrate the release, they are heading on a headline tour across the East Coast. Dates are as follows:

Sunday 3 November - The Dock, Gadigal / Sydney

Saturday 23 November - Echo & Bounce, Meanjin / Brisbane

Saturday 7 December - The Tote Front Bar, Naarm / Melbourne

All shows are free entry.