All posts tagged mcgrath

  • Rolling Stone story: ‘Hungry Kids of Hungary Get Serious’, February 2013

    A story that was published in the March 2013 issue of Rolling Stone Australia. Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

    Hungry Kids Of Hungary Get Serious

    Personal tragedies and isolation inform the Brisbane band’s second album

    'Hungry Kids of Hungary Get Serious' story in Rolling Stone by Andrew McMillen, February 2013A band that writes a debut album brimming with sunny indie pop songs can be reasonably expected to write more of the same for their follow-up. Such was the situation in which Brisbane’s Hungry Kids of Hungary expected to find themselves following 2010’s Escapades, which hit a sweet-spot between classic Sixties-era pop and their modern take on the form. Real life has a habit of intervening, though.

    In March 2011, the four-piece – Dean McGrath (lead vocals, guitar), Kane Mazlin (lead vocals, keys), Ben Dalton (bass) and Ryan Strathie (drums) – were booked for a three-week tour in North America, including showcases at South By South West and Canadian Music Week – great opportunities to extend the band’s growing reputation overseas. Then, suddenly, all shows were cancelled and the band was homeward bound.

    “2011 was a pretty full-on year for me,” says McGrath, whose experience triggered the return journey. “A lot went down. Naturally, that really coloured the songs I was writing.” He won’t be drawn on specifics, but notes that a “personal tragedy that affected someone I was close to” meant that he had to catch the next flight home.

    “That incident echoed throughout the whole year for me,” the singer/guitarist continues. “It was an ongoing ordeal. It’s funny; writing songs for this band, we’ve always been fairly carefree, but after that [experience], these songs started coming out that were fairly intimate and personal. I was like, ‘shit, how are people going to react to this when they hear it?’”

    The result is You’re A Shadow, a collection of songs somewhat divorced from Escapades’ brimming optimism. Kane Mazlin’s contributions were coloured by a sense of isolation and melancholy, too, in part influenced by a stint in Denmark while his girlfriend took an internship. “She was busy during the day. I was by myself: I didn’t speak Danish, didn’t know anyone,” he says, over a beer in late December. “That had a huge impact on two or three of the songs that I wrote.”

    It wasn’t all bad news internationally, though: footage filmed at the Dutch festival Pinkpop in May 2012 shows the band performing before a crowd of thousands. “The Netherlands seems to be the area where it’s taken off, which is weird,” says McGrath. “When we started talking about doing overseas stuff, that’s not really the area that we imagined we’d be delving into.” Mazlin chimes in: “I think Nirvana started there, didn’t they? It’s a goldmine!”

    After the rush of Pinkpop, though, it was an abrupt comedown in Belgium. The band played that show – “a giant blur of fun” is how Mazlin describes it – and then drove half a day to Antwerp. “We played a tiny show there, where no-one knew who we were,” says McGrath. “We were like, ‘what the hell? We only drove for a few hours, why don’t people know us here if they know us there?’ You forget that it’s a different country! We crossed a border, and they don’t get the same radio [stations]. Touring Australia has conditioned us to think that it’s natural to drive a few hours to get to the next big city!”

    When it came time to choose which tracks made the new album, the four tended not to argue too much about what made it past the rehearsal room. “We do try to keep it to four equal votes, but if two of us feel really passionately about something, then the other two will probably either give it a go, or scrap it,” says McGrath. “Song-wise, we haven’t had to do that a lot leading up to this record, because we’ve seen eye-to-eye on most things without any need for debate – which makes life easier.”

    Five things that influenced You’re A Shadow

    Classic pop

    Kane Mazlin: “I listened to a lot of Camera Obscura, The New Pornographers and The Shins; really nice, classic-sounding pop records with great guitar sounds.”

    Live quintet

    Dean McGrath: “Knowing that there’s a second guitarist during live shows drastically affected the way that I write my parts – it’s not so chordal, busy and strummy.”

    Debut co-write

    Mazlin: “We were on the same wavelength this time, to the point where we were able to co-write a song, ‘When Yesterday’s Gone’ – something we’d never done before.”

    Deerhunter

    McGrath: “I listened to Halcyon Digest on repeat for months, and it heavily influenced how we recorded a few songs in the studio: that ‘lo-fi pop songs, washed out’ approach.”

    Producer Wayne Connolly

    Mazlin: “He had great ideas from the very first email: he told [bassist] Ben Dalton, ‘you need a hollow-body bass and flatwound strings’. It sounded awesome!”

  • Rolling Stone story: ‘Hungry Kids Of Hungary Stay Close to Home for Debut Disc’, October 2010

    A story for the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, on Brisbane band Hungry Kids Of Hungary.

    Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

    Hungry Kids of Hungary Stay Close to Home for Debut Disc

    Queenslanders finally drop their debut after a pair of promising EPs

    For Brisbane-based indie pop quartet Hungry Kids Of Hungary, the three-year path to their debut album was paved with transcontinental correspondence, two EP releases, and a stack of national tours supporting the likes of OK Go, Little Birdy and Bertie Blackman.

    Escapades took shape in the suburban home of producer Matt Redlich, with whom the band recorded their second EP, last year’s Mega Mountain. Over cold drinks on a warm Brisbane day, singer/guitarist Dean McGrath and singer/keyboardist Kane Mazlin reflect on a recording process that began in January 2010 and concluded six months later.

    Ultimately, the band were faced with a choice: record with a familiar face in a comfortable, inexpensive environment, or return to Tony Buchen’s studio in Sydney, where the band recorded earlier single “Let You Down”.

    As an indie band faced with financial realities, though, the decision to remain Brisbane-bound seemed simple. “We love Matt’s recording space,” says McGrath. “It’s underneath his house; it’s just cosy, and suits us down in the ground. There’s a pool out the back. We started recording in January – when it was far hotter than this – so we could do takes and then go for a swim. I was interested in doing something different and pushing us out of our comfort zone, but I think the right decision got made in the end.”

    The band also found that removing time and money constraints had a positive effect on their songwriting. “We actually did some pre-production this time,” reveals Mazlin, in reference to an exhaustive process of rehearsal, deconstruction and rearrangement of each song.

    “Sometimes you end up putting it together exactly the same as you started,” says McGrath,”but I think it’s a dangerous thing to have an album’s worth of songs ready and then just recording those 12. The cool thing about stretching it out over a long time is there’s four songs on the record now that weren’t written at the start of the recording process.”

    Hungry Kids formed in mid-2007. Drummer Ryan Strathie had played in separate bands with both Mazlin and bassist Ben Dalton; McGrath was a mutual friend. As McGrath and Mazlin share vocal duties, the band agonised over Escapades‘  tracklisting. “It was always going to be a little tricky for us to make everything flow,” says Mazlin. “But I think we managed it.”

    When asked to pinpoint the band’s sound, McGrath is laconic. “Pop’s the simplest way to describe it. It’s what we do. I think it’s unnecessarily complicated to give it a whole bunch of sub-genres.”

    More Hungry Kids Of Hungary on MySpace. The music video for their song ‘Coming Around‘ is embedded below.