News

INTRODUCING: HATCHIE

• 1st Dec 2017

Hatchie is the world of Harriette Pilbeam. To hear her music is to step inside her mind; a dreamy landscape where cascading synths, jangling guitars and white noise undulate beneath undeniable and irresistible pop melodies. Rather than focusing on the external world of her daily life in Brisbane, Australia, Pilbeam instead turns her gaze inwards, making a soundtrack out of her daydreams, setting her emotional life to song.

New single “Sure” was written on a whim when a melody jumped into Pilbeam’s head and finished swiftly in one day. The chorus plaintively unravels, setting the sorrow to shimmering synth washes, wrapping the whole thing up in a melody so gorgeous that it would fit seamlessly into The Sundays and Alvvays songbooks.

“I wrote, “Sure” about people I know falling in and out of the same relationship issues as we grew out of our teens into early adulthood” she explains. “When I initially wrote it, it was about a couple that decided to give it “one more shot” over and over again because they couldn’t bear to be apart. When I think about all the lyrics now I realise that it could be interpreted in a number of different ways.”

The instinctual pop nous is undoubtedly on full display in “Sure”, but like all of Hatchie’s music, the track trades in shade as well as light. It’s at once accessible yet cerebral, walking a line between instant earworm and something deeper and more oblique. “I think that’s because I’m still making up my mind,” offers Harriette. “I’m kind of jumping between, ‘Do I want to just make fun pop songs? Or do I want it to be more shoegaze and more of a band sound?’ I really love writing pop songs, but then messing them up and turning them into something else. Something darker.”

“Sure” continues the story that began with pop gem “Try”; a runaway success at home in Australia, which also won Hatchie a fan in Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. “It’s pretty weird being social media friends with one of your heroes” laughs Pilbeam.

This second single, “Sure” precedes what already looks to be a busy 2018 worldwide, with shows at SXSW already confirmed and much more news to follow soon.