by Taylor Ruckle (@taylorruckle)
On their sophomore LP Process, Melbourne post-punk quartet Pinch Points remain steadfast in their righteous anger. For all the ways the world has changed since the release of their 2019 debut, Moving Parts –all piercing, clean-toned riffs and sarcastic, shouted lyrics- the list of alarms to sound has only gotten longer in the wake of ongoing environmental catastrophe, even putting aside the COVID-19 pandemic. So they continue to approach a world both literally and figuratively on fire with needle-sharp focus, a codified sound, and even coordinated dress. They’re a band who know where they’re coming from, and it’s nowhere in the vicinity of fucking around.
As on Moving Parts, Pinch Points has a keen sense of where the problems lie in so-called Australia and beyond. On “Coppers,” it’s police brutality, and on “Haruspex,” it’s a culture that prizes conversation over action in preventing violence against women. While the state of the world gets more dire, though, so too does the band’s pointed brand of compassion and positivity; they’re uplifting even in their snark and their uncompromising politics. As they put it on “Relentlessly Positive,” the album’s last track: “You are valuable and loved, precious and human / unless you’re a Tory, but I’m not assuming a thing.” And as they implore on “Am I Okay?” in a bid for a kind of de-commodified self-care: “You need to know you’re worth everything and improve the world you’re living in.”
Ahead of the March 18 release of Process, the band’s two lead vocalists, bassist Acacia Coates and guitarist Adam Smith, spoke to Post-Trash about their first professional recording experience and navigating the relationships between people and social systems–within and without the pandemic.
credit: Charlie Ashfield
You all wear your own band t-shirts in your promo stuff and on stage. I'm curious, what's your thinking there?
Coates: We didn't do it straight off. There was a point a few gigs in I guess where we were like, "If we're gonna wear them, we might as well all wear them and really commit to them," and ever since then, it's been every single gig, every single photo. I think the thinking was like the themes that were in the songs as well. Is that where it came from for you, Adam?
Smith: There's a bit of that. I feel like originally, it was also kind of driven by--you know, people walk into the band room and they see us, and they instantly know what band is playing. You don't have to worry about having your name on the kick drum or something, 'cause you're using someone else's drum kit.
Coates: We had the first EP being called Mechanical Injury, and we were singing about being part of the machine, and I feel like that was our way of, like, "We'll just make ourselves look more like a machine, and little units in the group or the production line that we are." It also makes it really easy to get dressed for a gig! You just have to choose pants.
It feels like breaking one of those unspoken rules, right? There's that thing where even as an audience member, you're not supposed to wear the shirt of the band you're going to see. There's this weirdness about that in music scenes.
Coates: For sure. I feel like our approach is, like, overcommit to the point where it feels okay.
Smith: I think it also gives people permission to wear our shirts to our shows. 'Cause like, we're wearing them.
Coates: Yeah, it's like a little club shirt, and I feel like I'm starting to get to the point where I go to gigs in Melbourne, and I see people that I don't know wearing our shirts, and that feels odd. Usually I feel like it's mates, so now when I see someone wearing it I don't know, I'm like, "Hey! Who's that?" [laughs]
You mentioned this ethos of being conscious about being part of a machine. Adam, you gave this very interesting quote in an ABC feature a few years ago where you said, "I came around to the idea of society as a machine and the way that we all kind of submit to and build this thing together." How did you come around to that idea?
Smith: It was kind of in the sense of acknowledging that structural problems in the world and personal problems require a personal response, but also the fact that they're the product of--not in terms of blaming everyone for the world's problems, but the fact that the world's problems exist because of people, and that to an extent, you kind of can mold the world, or at least the community that you live in, and at least be conscious of the way that the world has made you and the way that you make the world.
There's a Newton's law there--action and reaction.
Smith: It's a two-way street. Obviously, the world has more effect on a person than a person has an effect on the world, but collectively, people make the world, I guess, and people make the band.
Coates: I feel like that carries through on the lyrics in this most recent album as well. We have this slightly observational tone about lots of things that we're seeing around us, like structural issues that maybe are quite specific to so-called Australia, but also, I feel like, other places in the world–issues with bushfire management and issues with how we treat our indigenous peoples. We kind of bring that idea of individuals observing the mistakes we're making, or the things we could be doing better if we all educated ourselves and pulled together.
I feel like we have this balance of pessimistic but also hopeful. We're trying to sing about these things from a place of caring, but we're also sometimes just observing things that we think really aren't going well, and I guess by singing about them, we're trying to add to the messages around them. I dunno! [laughs] It's big, big stuff going on in that concept, which Adam is always very good at bringing to the songs in this band.
When did the songs for Process take shape?
Smith: The pandemic has kind of screwed with my internal clock. I feel like they started to take form a bit over a year ago?
Coates: I think two years ago, because a year ago in March 2021, we recorded the songs. The only reason I know this is 'cause I made that little video about the making of the album [laughs] and I put the bloody months on it. I think we started it, like, early 2020, right before we were gonna go play Golden Plains. We were starting to write some of the songs, and then we kinda got locked away and we would do them when we could. It's been a few years in the making, which is drawn out for us. Usually we would just slap a bunch of songs together, record them, and put that out as soon as we could. It's strange to have to wait for things.
Smith: Have a long process.
Hence the name?
Smith: Yeah.
The way the world has responded to a global pandemic–I think a lot of people have been confronted with the way the machine of the world works ordinarily, and the way it works when everything gets thrown up in the air. To have the pandemic start, how did it change the way you were putting these songs together?
Smith: It is kind of like the machinery of the world has been shown to be a lot more fragile than what we take for granted, but with this record, it's kind of ironic because, I guess in a good way, it isn't really explicitly a pandemic record. A lot of the stuff was written before anything happened, but then ironically you have songs like "Virga," which is about the Black Summer bushfires that we had here in 2019, 2020, and the institutional and government response to that was an absolute shambles. After that, there were a few months of breathing room, and then the pandemic, and you repeat the process with health instead of the environment, and it's completely bungled as well. Although Australia, to begin with, actually did fairly well comparatively.
I was going to say, just based on my experience and what I've heard from international news, it's like, "Oh, they actually maybe had a leg up on us there."
Coates: Yeah, we went hard on the cautionary lockdown measures early on, but then it's funny, in the past six months, it's felt like things have changed so drastically. I said to my partner last night, it's been like whiplash trying to deal with all the expectations changing of how we're supposed to be living our life or not living our life, and in terms of the government finally deciding, "Alright, most people are getting vaccinated, so therefore, anyone that's gonna get COVID is just gonna get COVID, and we don't really care about that anymore.” It's gonna rip through the community, and we're at the stage we kinda need to actually make that happen, from their perspective, to progress. Anyway, it's been a weird tail-end--not that it's over, but yeah, it's been odd. We've had, like, the highest cases ever, but only in the more recent period as opposed to other countries that had that early on.
So then you have songs like "Reasons to be Anxious," obviously, but also "Stock It.” It feels very timely just because again, it's just describing the way that global capitalism operates every day, but there are ways in which, when you don't leave your house, the exploitation is more apparent, and delivery services and such become more part of the norm.
Smith: It's hard to see the songs outside of a pandemic lens now, but I think it's also--yeah, 'cause I guess "Reasons to be Anxious” touches on being cooped up inside and all of that, but most of the stuff that we write about is us being shouty and angry and sarcastic about the world's problems, and the pandemic exacerbates all of those problems.
Like, so many people get super duper stressed out with supply chain issues and so on, and I don't know if it happened in the States, but over here, people were just hoarding toilet paper, 'cause it was the only thing people could do to have some semblance of control. It's kind of funny that everyone complains about the way that the capital system is so fragile, but also ever-present, but then when things go wrong, people want to be able to go to the beauty salon and get their nails done, or they just want to buy as much toilet paper as they can.
It's this two-sided thing of, like, "The world is so fucked! But I want it to go back to just being slightly fucked, as opposed to really fucked." [laughs] There's very little appetite, I think, for a big--you know, the whole idea of a Build Back Better. "Let's remake the world, now that it's been broken." The problem is that after two years of lockdowns and all that stuff, no one has any appetite. The only change people want is to be able to just change back to how it was.
Coates: "Stock It" is funny, 'cause I wrote those lyrics fully not from a pandemic perspective, more just environmentally. Why do we expect to be able to have everything instantly, especially if it involves flying everything all around the world to get it to different parts when it's not in season or it's not a commodity there? And then it's funny, you get the pandemic, and when we had most COVID ripping through the community and lots of staff in supermarkets not being able to work, and then things weren't on the shelves, people get real mad.
It kinda just seemed like the theme of not being able to have exactly what you want when you want it ironically got proved even more for me when I would go to my local supermarket and it was people like, "There's no meat! I can't make whatever I want for dinner!" We are all very reliant on just whatever we want, and I feel like that's a strange way to live, but that's kind of what you get in our society.
Smith: It reminds me of when we were kids. I can't remember which one it was, but there was a big cyclone up in Queensland, in the north of the country, and that's where all of our bananas come from. Bananas were suddenly $11 a kilo, and everyone was absolutely losing their shit about how expensive bananas were. It's like, "It's a banana! Bananas are great, but you can just wait. Calm down.”
Coates: Like, every day of the year, not very expensive in the off-season, it's ridiculous.
There's gotta be an alternate source of potassium, right?
Coates: [laughs] I know! Get more creative.
One of the other songs you touched on is "Virga," which feels more produced than other Pinch Points songs–it opens with that really tense atmospheric escalation and the samples. Tell me about how that song came together.
Smith: Well, a huge part of the--'cause with the Black Summer bushfires, our prime minister fucked the whole thing. Basically, in the lead-up to the fire season, all of the state fire chiefs had written open letters to the prime minister being like, "We wanna have a nationalized system. If there's fires in the north but nowhere else, we need to be able to move all of our firefighting shit up there, and we need to have a coordinated response, and we need to sort that out before it starts," which didn't happen. And then in the middle of the whole fuckin' thing, the prime minister flew off to Hawaii for a little holiday, and then came back and tried to pretend that everything was ok, and was walking around fire-stricken communities literally grabbing people by the hand so he could get a photograph of the handshake.
With the production aspect, that instantly reminded me of the fact that our prime minister, Scott Morrison, used to be our treasurer, and when he was the treasurer, he was going on about how good coal is for Australia and how people were coal-phobic. I just went and got that speech and spent a couple of days re-cutting it so that he's now saying for us how bad coal is, and how coal is gonna fuck us over, and whatever. It was just that, and then there was also--
Coates: We used a--I don't know the exact term.
Smith: It's like an air raid siren.
I was gonna ask you specifically if that's what it was--it has that feeling to it.
Coates: It's strange, but my partner's parents are sound artists, and they had heaps of things they got for an art installation show, so I was like, "Can I borrow one of these and take it to the studio?" Then we had a few goes of revving it up at different speeds and volumes. I guess in a kind of morbid way, it sounds like you're alerting people of fires coming towards you, but also, another interesting thing was--the Pinch Points phrase being like, protect your fingers from getting squashed, it had a little hand symbol on it, which was just so perfect for us. It was like, “Don't put your fingers in the windy bit.”
We were trying to experiment a little more, 'cause we were recording it in a studio for the first time with a producer, and we were like, "We gotta try different things and not just play the riffs and shout." It was one of the things where we were like, "We'll add another layer. We'll try a sample." At first, we didn't like just having Scott Morrison's voice, like--
Smith: On its own.
Coates: We wanted to make him a little bit demonic at the end to emphasize that, 'cause it almost feels like he doesn't deserve to be on your track. He's that grotty. We were like, "What could we do...we'll pitch shift him at the end so he sounds like the demon that he is, and then maybe that'll make it okay." [laughs]
Smith: I remember when we brought the siren in, 'cause we were unsure about whether we were gonna use it or not, and Anna, the producer, was like, "Yes! Yes!" [laughs] "If we have time, but yes!"
Tell me more about that recording process–you worked with Anna Laverty at Audrey Studios. How did that connection get made, and what was the studio dynamic?
Coates: I think I was suggesting Anna. I met her through a program called Amplify, but it was previously called Girls Rock Melbourne, which might ring a bell to you because it's based off the American Girls Rock camp for young women and gender diverse kids to get mentored in music and empowerment. I think in Portland or somewhere, Carrie Brownstein and other musicians have been part of that. Anyway, that has started up in Australia, and I was getting involved with the Melbourne branch of that, and I met Anna Laverty through the early planning of those camps.
She's just really impressive and a powerhouse, and when we came to having discussions about if we're gonna record it in a studio with a producer–because previously, we'd just kind of self-recorded, self-produced everything with Adam using his skills in those areas–she just seemed like the best option, like the person that we were most keen to collaborate with. We met with her, and it all sounded really great, and she was open to us still having that "co-produced by Pinch Points and Anna" kind of collaboration, so that's how it started.
Smith: Before we recorded, we went through a couple sessions with Anna going over the songs as we had them, and she made some notes and some suggestions, like, "Oh, I think we should scrap this section, or move this around, or shorten this." There was a bit of back and forth on that, and for me, it started to come together. 'Cause to begin with, I was thinking of it in a bit of a take it or leave it kind of way. Like, either we go “No, stop telling us what to do, they're our songs,” or it was, "Okay, well, Anna knows what she's doing. She's been in the industry for this long, XYZ, so we should just listen."
But for me, it seemed to crystallize pretty well into a, "No, this is a collaboration. It's a conversation." It ended up coming down to almost treating it like, in a regular band discussion, there were five people now instead of four. Anna had her expertise in all the production aspects, and we needed to take that seriously, but also there was the band's intent, and we have that expertise because we obviously wrote the songs. And then balancing that all together, which was really nice. It worked out pretty well.
Coates: Everything felt quite conversational in terms of suggestions she would give about how to do different takes, or trying things in different vocal styles, and then when we'd go back into the control room and listen to the takes [laughs] I almost feel like we seemed kind of annoying. We'd be like, "Go back to that little section!" It was quite collaborative in both aspects. Like, her giving some direction about how we played the takes, but then us with what we captured and what we wanted to do in certain parts of the tracks. It was a really fun process.
What was the biggest thing you were able to learn from the expertise that she brought?
Smith: For me, it was just doing the takes. There were lots of moments where we would say, "Oh, that was great!" And Anna would go, "No, do it again." There was a bit of her corralling us a little, like, "Okay, guys, that was pretty good. We'll do two, maybe three more takes, and then we'll stop." [laughs] "But you can do it again." At certain points, I think also toward the end, being like, "That was really good, it's fine," and she was like, "No, just do it one more time."
Coates: It's nice to have that outside perspective from someone who's not playing the song ten times in a row and getting sick of it. Once you're playing it that many times, it kind of loses the meaning, and you can't tell if you played it with the right energy, so it was good to have her being like, "No, do it this time, but with this kind of feeling in mind." I remember her saying, "Do that bit again, Acacia, but come in with confidence." I was like, "Oh, shit, am I not coming in with confidence? Okay, need to remember that."
Smith: There was also a bit of the opposite of it as well, where sometimes we were like, "Oh, that could be better," like a vocal take or something, and Anna being like, "No, keep it. That was great." Someone was like, "Oh, I've flubbed this note," and she's like, "I didn't even hear it. I've been listening to it over again and I can't hear it. Don't worry. It's fine."
Coates: Especially with you and Jordan's guitar, or certain vocal things. I think we have one version of how we think it's supposed to sound in our minds, and then she'll be like, "Actually, what you did was better," and if she wasn't there, we would've just agonized over getting it one particular way. But really, it doesn't have to be only one way.
I want to talk about the end of this record, which is where the push and pull between the problems with the world and the effort to push forward come to a head. Tell me about writing the song "Relentlessly Positive.”
Smith: I think that was just coming from a general point of, like, the world and the machine and that idea, but when I started writing the words to it, it was just wanting to be a little more joyful about it. But also coming from a point of, you know, “The world's not gonna be nice to you, so you might as well be nice to yourself,” and not from a mental health perspective, but more of a, you know, “Isn't it nice and wonderful that so many people are so different? Even all the dickheads.” Not the absolute assholes–they're not nice–but like, people can be weird and wacky, and that's cool. I think it was also wanting to just be a little bit snarky, kind of be like, [shouting] "Chin up! Chin up!"
There's an aggressiveness even to the positivity on this record that I really found myself appreciating.
Coates: Yeah, "Am I Okay?" as well, we're always shouting. [laughs]
It takes a moment to even parse the intent of that because it's the same tone as the last few songs. I have to stop myself and go, "Oh, wait, they're actually telling me something entirely different here."
Coates: Someone said to us recently, "You should have lighting that goes green or red depending on whether you're being sincere or not," and Adam was like, "No, that's too easy. We have to leave people guessing.”
Smith: We didn't write the song to be a closer, but fairly early on, I think we settled on the idea of "Relentlessly Positive" being the last song, I guess to kind of let people let their breath out, and that's why the song also gets away from the music sounding aggressive and ends with the nice kind of country bits.
But I think using the same kind of tone and delivery for positive and negative stuff, it's a way to infuse them together. To be like, "Even though this song makes you angry, there are still good things in the world, or even though you can be nice to yourself and blah blah blah, that doesn't mean that you stop looking at the problems in the world, or the problems that you might be causing, or the problems that you might be causing to yourself." Those two things exist together as opposed to being like, "Here's our really angry song, and here's our really nice song."
Not only that, but to me it signals that this is not a nihilistic anger. Like, there's value in humanity such that it's worth working for things to be better.
Smith: Yeah, and it's worth being angry about, but also, you can't be angry all the time. [laughs]
"Am I Okay?" is a song about taking care of yourself, so for each of you, what are the things that help you when you realize that you need to make that effort?
Smith: I generally just make an effort to pause and not rush into feeling things too quickly, I think. In a practical aspect, if you rush a task, you're gonna fuck it up, and if you rush your feelings, you're gonna fuck them up too. I also just take my dog for walks. She calms me down. What about you, Acacia?
Coates: I don't feel like I've got any of it figured out, but I like what you're saying, Adam, and I feel like I relate to that. Recently, post-lockdown, I feel like I've been trying to resume all the activities at once, and it's kind of a lot. I feel like I need to take more stock of that. It's funny, Adam and I were texting about this the other day. We've just put out the song "Am I Okay?" and we're still texting asking each other how we're coping with different things, and Adam's like, "You're not listening to your own lyrics!" And I'm like, "No! I don't take my own anecdotal lyrical advice.” So I don't know; it's a work in progress.
But it can be aspirational that way.
Coates: Yeah, it's nice to have yourself singing to yourself reminding you to look after yourself. [laughs]
Smith: I also think just mates and people writing or texting us about the songs–with "Am I Okay?" and the music video, people were saying, "Oh, this is so sweet. This is really nice. I really needed this." That makes me feel really good and very proud about the whole thing because being nice to other people is good for you. [laughs]
Coates: Yeah, and with the band, I feel like I've been clinging onto this weird pandemic caution about anything that we do. It kinda still doesn't feel real that we're putting this stuff out into the world, and there's an album coming, and there's bigger shows coming. I think I still feel like it might all get taken away, so it's nice to hear other people's responses to it to remind me that it's a real thing, and we're coming out of this and moving forward.