Project Description

Interview with

PIERCE BROTHERS

Interviewer: Meg Price and Katelyn Murray

from AMNPLIFICATION

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Melbourne folk-pop duo Pierce Brothers have released their latest single Back End Roads, the first taste of new music that will be featured on their upcoming full-length debut album, Atlas Shoulders. The album is set for release on October 26 and is now available for pre-order HERE.Fans who pre-order the album will receive a special limited edition 7” vinyl single featuring Back End Roads as well as album track Juno. 

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So first of all congratulations on your new album – up and coming album! So what should fans expect for Altas Shoulders.

Fans will expect a little bit more happier times. We’ve always been a bit melancholy with some of our old singles like Follow Me In The Dark or Overdose or It’s My Fault, and that was always kind of the tragic love song. There’s a couple of them on this one but we have a little bit lighter with a couple songs and with some songs that we’ve released that are a bit more full of love and a bit more hopeful and that sort of stuff. We talked about the deeper sort of elements – anxiety and depression and that sort of stuff and so we tried to sort of interweave as much from the last year of touring and what our lives have been like and we’ve tried to tell sort of a cohesive story from the starting song to the end. 

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Nice, yeah a bit of a balance. 

Yeah, of course, we really want to try and do a light and shade. The happy love songs that we wrote on this album we haven’t really explored before because we kind of  found it lame or cheesy or kind of… there was always that voice saying “it’s going to sound cheesy.” 

And then we started doing them and went – no actually this is fine? Like this is actually moving as shit! This is beautiful! 

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So you guys already kind of answered it, but did you guys look to anything to find an inspiration for this new record? You said before like touring and everything like that. 

Yeah, well we were just talking about you know – if you asked what were we listening to when we’re in the studio, a friend of Jack’s brought around the new Gang of Youths album and said “Dude you’ve gotta listen to this!” and put it on and then Jack called me up and was like “dude just go listen to the new Gang of Youths album right now, front to back and then call back.” And this was like a week before recording started and I sort of called him up and was like “what the fuck are we gonna do” like “what the fuck are we gonna do – like we’re fucked.” This is the best thing I’ve ever fucking heard in my life how are we ever going to do anything near as good as this. 

We can’t even create the worst song of this album. 

I know! Like lets just fucking quit now. But it actually helped us in the end as we were trying to record. You know, because our album actually explores a really wide range of genres and sounds and the idea of them telling a story from front to back, we thought we tried to do that kind of cool things that they did. So yeah that was a very large portion of the songs had already been written so it was more about the way that we approached it rather than the way that we wrote it. Cause it was bloody fantastic that album, so we approached it in such a way that – and you know because they have some really hopeful songs in there and then when we were in the studio we wrote Juno because we were getting really stuck on one song which was Stand Up and we were 15 hours in, we were all exhausted and we said “you know what, lets all go out back and have a beer and just kind of clear our minds for a second” and then someone had the idea and said “have a try and can you play an open G” and I said “nup fuck it” and they said “Nick to get our minds right, lets try something that’s a G” and then within like 10 minutes Juno was written, and that’s one of our favorite tracks on the record. And it was written about the Juno keyboard that was in the studio, so it worked out. But after listening to that album (Gang of Youths) we were like “okay let’s get the string quartet in here” like for every song. 

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Haha just recreate the entire album! 

Hahahahaha yeah, fuck the plan for the album lets just copy these guys. 

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So is there any backstory to why the album is called Atlas Shoulders? 

So one of the songs Stand Up is a lot about just straight touring and the relationship between me and Jack just living in each other’s pockets basically for most of the year and if you speak to any of our touring crew they’d tell you that Jack and I can fight like there’s no tomorrow, and it takes a big toll on us. So that song was all about touring and the effects it had on our psyche and there’s this line “my atlas shoulders aching” because Atlas was the Greek god that carried the world on his shoulders. It’s just all about stress and anxiety and there’s a lot of things in that song and on the album that really does talk about that and trepidation you get when recording and doing an album. A lot of that anxiety of “will this be good enough or this is gonna be too copied”.

Like we’ve joked before about that sort of thing but that was the immediate influence when writing this album and that’s what Wonderwall was written about you know? Like they were trying to get a second album out and they were really anxious so we were like “let’s just write about this” we were worried in the studio getting totally stressed out and we were like “why don’t we write about this.” 

There’s a lot of different aspects of how anxiety has an effect on us in a lot of different ways. So we decided to dedicate the album to that because there’s also a bit of a celebration of overcoming that and escapism and tour or just pure love and joy in Juno and Trip Lovers. So there’s a lot of focus on mental health on a lot of songs throughout the album. 

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That’s beautiful. So what was it like touring with fellow Aussie Tash Sultana in the US and the UK? 

Well I mean we’ve toured with Tash for years, we started busking on the streets together like maybe 5/6 years ago. So you know, she’d play half an hour then we’d play half an hour. We sort of toured together for years. Years and years ago she was supporting us and then she just went through the roof- 

For about 18 months or two years we took her around Australia and then Tash just fucking exploded but you know, she’s like our little brother so she was like “guys do you wanna come on the road?” and we were like “Fuck yeah we’ll come on the road!” and we’re just a family, we’ve got the same managers and the same managers in Europe as well. 

We’ve been doing it together for about 5 years now and it’s just a good fit. 

We’re supposed to go surfing with her on Sunday.

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