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BIO

In all recorded music, a sense of space becomes embodied, whether in a lyrical reference to place or by the reverberation captured in the room. Both cases ring true for New Zealand husband and wife duo, Terrible Sons. Made up of Matthew and Lauren Barus, the couple alongside their two children, live in an intentional community near Christchurch, NZ. Besides offering a system of mutual support and belonging, the community also provides much of the inspiration behind the band’s work. While their debut EP certainly radiates a more muted acoustic vibe, the band’s most recent work, With Feathers, reaches a deeper level of intimacy. No doubt, a product of living in such a tight-knit neighborhood, it’s also the result of making music in a house full of children. As Matt says, “It was made like that because I recorded it all late at night and I didn’t want to wake anyone.” That hushed quality is then a reflection of stealing away smaller moments to make music and settling into family life.

Before Matt and Lauren met, they were both touring musicians in New Zealand, each making music work for them in different ways. After attending jazz school where she studied voice and piano, Lauren worked as a solo artist, doing session work and playing support for big-name artists like Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie. While playing with collaborative supergroup, Fly My Pretties, Lauren also released music under the moniker L.A. Mitchell. Matt on the other hand, grew up playing church music and in his words, “I remember crying my way out of music lessons so I could play soccer instead.” Later during his university years, he describes hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the first time, saying “if there was a moment, that was the moment.” He later formed rock group The Dukes with his brother, eventually landing a publisher and touring with Blondie and The Pretenders. In need of a keyboardist, the band brought on Lauren and as the proverbial saying goes, the rest is history.

With distinct musical backgrounds, Matt and Lauren combine their sonic tendencies to create a cohesive and lush sound. But the core of this creative partnership goes beyond genre or technical ability, and ultimately comes down to trust — not to say that the process doesn’t have its complications. “We often battle which I think is a good thing,” says Lauren. “One of us will come with the idea for a song and the other has the editing input and that’s been a really precious relationship to discover.” She continues, “Prior to that, I never had someone close enough to operate as that editor and it’s a delicate role. If you open up your material to the wrong person, it can really roll you backwards. What Matt and I have discovered is by virtue when you’re married, you have to figure things out. Creatively, it reflects that process. I trust him and at the end, we’re either arguing to keep an idea because it’s the better idea or we’re finding a better idea through the process of that conversation.” Musically, with Lauren’s voice and piano background, she brings a spaciousness to the Terrible Sons’ sound, while Matt’s guitar playing “leans towards the angular.” And though the guitar is used percussively, Matt also likes experimenting with more open or ambiguous chords. Lauren distills their partnership saying, “while Matt would chase the unexpected, I would probably chase the things that flow.”

This juxtaposition certainly carries through in the duo’s upcoming release, With Feathersand the idea of contrast, both in sound and subject matter, recurs throughout the five songs that make up the EP. Though it feels cinematic their set up is small, and every track feels both grounded in deeply personal issues and celestial in nature. If there is a theme that rises above the rest, it is hope in all its incarnations. In naming the EP, Matt says, “We called it With Feathersbecause there’s that Emily Dickinson poem, ‘hope is the thing with feathers.’ We like that idea of hope being light, flying away from it or flying to it.” “Flying despite it,” Lauren adds. Naturally, the duo looked to the people they know best: their neighbors. “There are a lot of people with mental health issues, and there’s an addiction center just down the road,” says Matt. “A lot of the songs are in some way connected to mental health — looking at other people’s lives or looking at our own, and just the juggle of having children in the midst of that.”

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The first track off the record, “Ruffle” deals directly with that juggle and the balancing act any creative parent or partner must manage. Matt describes the hard reality that “Ruffle” explores saying, “the thought is, the thing you do so well is the thing that takes you away from the people that you love.” While Matt and Lauren seem to have found the middle ground between being an artist and being a parent, they certainly recognize that “seeing your partner do the thing that they’re exceptionally well at is a beautiful thing,” as Lauren puts it. They also make note of a cultural distinction between Eastern and Western cultures. Matt says, “I grew up in Indonesia where your local community is really important. To us there’s a dialogue that has to happen while I think often in the West, if you’re doing well at something you forsake everything. That’s the conundrum for us.”

Second track “Please” documents the inevitable frustration that comes with community living with Matt saying, “You can sit outside yourself and see how you’re acting with others and it’s not the person you really want to be but you just don’t have the energy.” “Rolling Thunder” is next, and the pulsing tune churns forward, capturing the movement of a gathering storm while the lyrics deal with something much less upbeat. As Matt says, “it’s about someone in our neighborhood who grew up devoid of love and wishing you could make a difference, but not knowing what to do.” It’s a beautiful display of what Terrible Sons does so well: by building an atmosphere that feels both energetic and melancholic, a very distinct and spellbinding tension is formed between the song’s groove and its underlying meaning.

Towards the end of the EP comes single “Hold Fire,” a powerful plea for others to stop viewing complex issues with such a rigid and intolerant lens. “I really wanted to write something that said there’s another way that it could be. You can handle complexity and be prepared to have things be unresolved,” says Lauren. She goes on to describe her personal connection to the song noting, “the intersection for me personally was being a parent. Your kids make you angry and I realized I was actually quite angry. Parts of the song are me trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with anger.” In a broader sense, the duo’s love of more ambiguous and suspended chords translates lyrically with one of the main refrains stating, “wait in the grey, let it settle.” Lauren says, “there’s part of that conversation in ‘Hold Fire’ that if we allow that space for the grey, then people who may not bring forward an idea could, because it’s not relevant to be right or wrong. There is space to offer a diversity of perspective.”  

Opening up that space for dialogue is more than just source material for Matt and Lauren; it’s a life philosophy, despite the hardships that come with it. “It’s easier not to be involved with people because relationships are fraught and often hard work. That’s what we try to lean into — not that we always succeed,” says Matt. “We often say, you have high highs and really low lows living in community, because you’re with people when they celebrate but you’re also with them when they’re in a space of sorrow. Any relationship is a privilege, that they let you into their lives and we try to go deeper with people.” If With Feathersis a sonic reflection of how Matt and Lauren relate to others, than they’ve succeeded in reaching a more connected place. A beautiful collection of songs, Terrible Sons have proven their ability to create a compelling and cohesive world for their listeners. With Feathersis out July 26th on Nettwerk Records.

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