Body TypeCollaboration is the guiding force behind Body Type, but it wasn’t until their new album that they wrote their first song together from scratch. Eye Is A Mouth Is A Face sprang into existence during a pre-production session in Wollongong with producer Stella Mozgawa, an Australian expat who plays with both Warpaint and Courtney Barnett.
“It came together in the heat of the moment,” says guitarist Sophie McComish over Zoom. “We’ve never done that before. I think it started with the rhythm section.”
“Yeah, there was a strange bass line that Cec [drummer Cecil Coleman] hooked onto,” adds bassist Georgia Wilkinson-Derums. “We went from there, really.”
Usually one member will bring in a demo, and the others will add music or lyrics to it from there. For Eye…, the lyrical inspiration came from the Louise Bourgeois exhibition Has The Day Invaded The Night Or Has The Night Invaded The Day? at the Art Gallery Of New South Wales.
McComish and Wilkinson-Derums had each seen the exhibition individually, and both had taken phone notes that became grist for lyrics.
The finished song is one of many highlights from Body Type’s third album, Tally. It’s characteristically intricate, with call-and-response lyrics and urgent vocal harmonies heightening the song’s already spiky quality.
And like so many Body Type tunes, it blurs the lines between indie rock, post-punk and classic guitar-pop.
Decade Strong
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The band formed ten years ago in Sydney, with guitarist Annabel Blackman joining McComish, Coleman and Wilkinson-Derums in co-founding a sharp-edged four-piece that immediately got noticed.
A pair of EPs set the table for their 2022 debut Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising and its 2023 follow-up Expired Candy, along with support slots at home and abroad with Pixies, Wolf Alice, and Fontaines D.C.
Recent years have seen the band members mix up their geographical locations, with McComish and Coleman still in Sydney but Wilkinson-Derums in Western Australia and Blackman on the NSW coast.
They all keep quite busy with other pursuits between Body Type albums: McComish co-runs the indie label Blossom Rot (home to Cool Sounds, Loose Tooth and The Vovos), Blackman does her own thing in the cheekily named Solo Career, Wilkinson-Derums works as a stage and screen actor and Coleman moonlights in bands like Babitha and Moon Brain.
“We always make it work,” says McComish of the members’ distance from each other. “Actually, it doesn’t make it that hard really.”
Wilkinson-Derums chimes in: “When we’re writing and recording, we’re all in the same spot. So that makes it a little bit easier, [having] localised, intensive periods.”
Laying Down Tracks
After convening for that pre-production session in Wollongong – where the four found they had many key reference points in common with Mozgawa, including era-defining American indie rock bands like Pavement and Guided By Voices – Body Type reunited with Mozgawa at a Los Angeles studio in January 2025, right in the wake of the city’s much-publicised wildfires.
“I was personally very spooked by going over there, because all the stuff in the news was like ‘Don’t travel, it’s Armageddon’,” Wilkinson-Derums recalls. “So we were going into it thinking it was gonna be frightful, [but] we stayed in Los Feliz and that was its own little bubble.
“There were no signs of any fire-ravaged areas [there], but we did drive out to the Rose Bowl Flea Market [in Pasadena] one day and got to see some of the damage. And the Uber driver was clearly really affected.”
They also attended the fire relief benefit G*ve a F*ck LA, hosted by actor John C. Reilly and featuring sets from Courtney Barnett, St. Vincent, Hayley Williams and others.
And when the band members realised that their scheduled fortnight in the studio wouldn’t be quite long enough, they dropped the song count down from 14 to ten and did some final overdubs at Mozgawa’s home studio.
“We’re quite a hardworking band, and I was kind of astounded by how hardworking she was,” says Wilkinson-Derums of their collaboration with Mozgawa. “She also just seems like she knows everything, in the best possible way.
“You have a question and she has the answer for it. So it was a process of very quick learning for all of us.”
“It was quite cosmic, the way she just immediately clicked,” McComish adds. “From her perspective, I was thinking it would be quite intimidating to come into this band that was so close and had a decade’s worth of history and friendship behind us – and just immediately become the fifth member.
“Also, people lose their minds in the studio, and she dealt with all our marbles one by one.”
In addition to being on marbles duty, Mozgawa contributed bongos to the title track and piano to Planet 8, as well as some smaller synth and percussion bits.
Joining the five in the studio were two Antipodean engineers: Australian expat Bonnie Knight, who engineered the latest Amyl And The Sniffers record, and Mark Perkins, a New Zealander who has worked with Marlon Williams and Alex Cameron.
Oh Captain My Captain
With Blackman, McComish and Wilkinson-Derums alternately singing lead and all four members contributing to the songwriting, there’s a strong internal scaffolding within Body Type. Even as Tally adds some mellower turns and fun instrumental flourishes including 12-string electric guitar and Mellotron, the songs feel incredibly tight-knit.
“We operate within our own paradigm, so it’s 10 years of just playing by our own songwriting rules,” Wilkinson-Derums confirms with a laugh. “It feels special: Soph will bring a beautiful song to the group, and it’s almost like you have your own processing and your own observation of that song.
“And if you ask a question, Soph will give feedback and maybe a word will find its way in there. Or you’ve written a little phrase that she’s picked up on. Or maybe you said something three years ago or you had a birthday, and she’s writing about that. So it has a nice documentary [quality] to it.”
“I often wonder how solo artists actually do it,” McComish adds. “Like the self-editing and the self-promotion. I’m so grateful to have a band where everyone is so involved in making my weird little songs a reality. And I’m so grateful to be involved in turning their songs into smash hits.”
She compares their democratic songwriting process to a ship’s captain and crew: “Usually the person singing the song is the captain of that song.”
As for the standout vocal harmonies on Eye… and other tracks, both Wilkinson-Derums and McComish acknowledge how much work goes into that feature alone.
“I’m pretty particular,” admits McComish. “It’s like a little logic puzzle, figuring out how we can make a harmony while it still fits into something a bit melodic.”
The Scariest Part
Besides coming out in Australia on the band’s longtime label home, Poison City, Tally will see overseas release through King Gizz’s (p)doom, which is sure to boost Body Type’s profile all the more.
And following a September album launch tour in Australia, they’re heading to the UK and Europe to tour in support of Courtney Barnett.
The band road-tested some of this new material while playing at Sydney’s White Bay Power Station in April, and the Tally tunes should be well-trodden by the end of the September tour. And this being Body Type, a hectic overseas jaunt could spawn a few more new songs.
After all, Gorgeous is about McComish’s first-ever tarot reading and Planet 8 is about Wilkinson-Derums living on the eighth floor of a building – one floor below Split Enz legend Tim Finn.
In other words, these songs come from real life. Album opener And What Else? sees Blackman ask her partner to say flattering things to combat her insecurity.
The jangly Sick Bag is a pointed song about McComish’s time in a frustrating relationship (“My heart/A little baby bird/You hold it in your grip till it shits through your fingertips”) and the closing Everything All In A Row is what she calls “a very personal song about loss and growth”.
McComish was listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue in the lead-up to writing songs for the album, which may have influenced those more vulnerable turns.
So do the band members ever feel reticent about sharing such personal dispatches? “I don’t feel like they’re ever that obvious,” says Wilkinson-Derums, “but I suppose they are. They’re experiential in nature.”
“I feel like with Body Type,” explains McComish, “friendship comes first. So Georgia knows everything about me anyway, before I turn it into a song.
“Maybe it’s more about sharing it publicly, like, ‘Oh, now everyone’s hearing this really personal thing that I wrote.’ But in the context of the band, it’s very natural.”
Wilkinson-Derums agrees: “There’s a thick layer of fictionality on them. They’re not really ‘dear diary’ things; they go through so many different layers to come out the end as a different cyborg thing, really.”
That said, after three albums and one full decade, the members of Body Type continue to have each other’s backs.
“It helps to perform with three other people who are your best friends,” concludes Wilkinson-Derums, “because it’s not an easy thing standing on stage singing songs that you’ve written to anyone that you don’t know. That’s the scariest part.”
Body Type’s Tally arrives on July 24th on Poison City/(p)doom.
Body Type – Australian Tour Dates & Instore Performances
Friday, July 24th – Sound Merch Instore, Melbourne , VIC
Saturday, July 25th – PROP Records Instore, Sydney, NSW
Friday, September 4th – Seasonal Brewing, Perth, WA
Saturday, September 5th – Buffalo Club, Fremantle, WA
Thursday, September 10th – Unholy, Sydney, NSW
Friday, September 11th – The Servo, Port Kembla, NSW
Friday, September 18th – Junk Bar, Brisbane, QLD
Saturday, September 19th – Mapleton Pub, Mapleton, QLD
Thursday, September 24th – The Tote, Melbourne, VIC
Friday, September 25th – The Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine, VIC
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
