Spelling Out RAT!hammock’s Newest Release ‘Word Of The Day’
Known as Melbourne’s favourite rock rodents, RAT!hammock have been hitting all the right notes. Not quite lo-fi and not quite 90s rock, the band hits the ideal middle, putting out dramatic and emotional tracks that are sure to get stuck in your head — believe me. They’re no stranger to the live scene either, touring nationally many times with various releases as well as playing festivals across the country. You name it, chances are they’ve played it.
Their indie-rock repertoire features the likes of six singles and an EP, with the fresh edition of ‘Word Of The Day’ to add to the mix. But ‘Word Of The Day’ comes as a little more than another (fabulous) track. It’s that little bit faster — the perfect track to jump to at shows — and features some dramatic and existential lyrics. The band seems to have an innate talent at painting a story with words and instruments, and that’s why they’re easily becoming one of the most loved bands in not only Melbourne, but perhaps even the country.
I had a chat to Tom, the lead guitarist, about all things RAT!hammock, the new single and the future of the band.
Em: FIRST OFF, HOW HAS THE BAND BEEN IN ISOLATION? HAVE YOU BEEN WRITING MUCH MUSIC? WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO?
Well, kind of ironically we finished off recording an EP just prior to everything getting locked down, so the first part of being shut down and isolating we actually just took a bit of a chance to chill out for a second and just take a little time to ourselves, but you know Jackson has been working on plenty of demos for his own stuff which we’ve been exchanging and working on. The band took some time to make a video on a green screen, you know using sheets of green paper that we got from office works and then set up in our houses. But yeah we’ve all been working on music and but its only kinda been like the last month or two months that we’ve sorta gotten back into the swing of actually working on the RAT!hammock stuff a bit more seriously.
YOUR NEW TRACK ‘WORD OF THE DAY’ DROPS THIS FRIDAY, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO FINALLY GET THIS ONE OUT?
It feels really really really good. It’s a different sort of song to a lot of the singles we’ve released in the past. Jackson writes a lot of lyrics that tend to be tongue in cheek or a little bit humorous, but often he writes from this almost Dan Kelly-like perspective where all the things are framed around visualised stories and characters, whereas I guess in ‘Word Of The Day’, it’s a little less concentrating on weaving stories and characters, and just being straight down the line with the thematic elements — but at the same time we still have a lot of humour and word play, almost like a sort of catch 22, talking in circles and stuff like that. So it’ll be really nice to see how that goes and how it feels and how everyone reacts to this new step in our song-writing.
YEAH THAT’S GREAT! AND I THINK EVERYONES REALLY KEEN TO HEAR IT. SO THE LYRICS ARE A BIT DIFFERENT, BUT IS THERE ANYTHING MUSICALLY THAT MIGHT BE DIFFERENT TO PAST TRACKS AS WELL?
Yeah absolutely! It’s a lot more upbeat than a lot of our other tracks. A lot of our songs in the past have been more dramatic or traumatic in ways where this one feels very pumping and upbeat. And if you look back at the other RAT!hammock tracks they’re pretty much 125 BPM, where this one’s a little bit faster and it’s got a bit of stuff behind it pushing it, and that feels really nice.
SOME OF YOUR OLDER STUFF IS A BIT SLOWER, WAS IT A DECISION IN THE MOMENT THAT YOU WERE GOING TO DO A FASTER TRACK OR DID IT JUST SORT OF JUST COME ABOUT?
Well, Jackson had presented some of his demos that we were all gonna work on as a band and see which ones would make it to the RAT!hammock stage and this one particularly stood out to me because it seems so different to other things we’ve pushed through, and I think it was appealing just based on the fact it was a little bit faster and funnier.
IT’S GOING TO BE A GOOD ONE TO JUMP AROUND WHEN LIVE SHOWS START BACK UP!
SO YOU MENTIONED THAT JACKSON RECORDS A LOT OF DEMOS, IS THAT SORT OF HOW THE CREATIVE PROCESS GOES FOR ALL YOUR SONGS, OR WAS THE PROCESS FOR ‘WORD OF THE DAY’ DIFFERENT?
That’s sort of the basis of how RAT!hammock tends to write tunes. Jackson will write a song and start demoing it and we will work on the demo as a band, and then Jackson will send us more stuff and he will ask what we think of this, or do you have anything for this. Then we eventually take it to the studio and break it down and re-record it. I guess ‘Word Of The Day’ was a little bit of different as he got the demo to quite an advanced stage sort of before the band began to talk about it, so it was a very fully formed sort of lo-fi track which I think helps when we came to the studio because it gave us a bit of direction about what we wanted to see from the track and what could be improved, instead of working on a more skeletal based demo.
WITH THIS ONE BEING MORE UPBEAT, DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO LEAN TOWARDS WRITING MORE UPBEAT TRACKS IN THE FUTURE? IS THAT MORE OF THE NEW DIRECTION FOR RAT!HAMMOCK?
Well we have other tracks coming up that are in the vein of the past tracks we’ve released, particularly in the style of ‘June’ or ‘Ghost’, and there’s another track that will come out that is in the opposite direction, that’s a little more dramatic in the story-telling vibe, but we think more importantly the track is a step for us to actually be more expansive with our sound and not worry whether the tracks suit RAT!hammock or has continuity with previous releases, and that’s really refreshing. I feel like we’re just starting to step into this new stage in the band where we feel like we don’t need to worry if this is right for us, we can just be like well this is what we are doing and what we want to do right now, and it sounds good so let’s go with it.
YOU GUYS ARE DOING A LITTLE SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN LEADING UPMTO THE RELEASE WITH THE ‘RAT!HAMMOCK WORD OF THE DAY’. CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT YOU GUYS WERE THINKING? WHAT WAS THE THOUGHT PROCESS BEHIND THAT?
To be honest it was fairly last minute, we only really shot the videos last week after thinking about them for half an hour. But I guess, you know, again going back to the lyrics of Word of the Day, where some of the words almost lose meaning or are re-contextualised in a lot of ways, just because of the way they stumble over each other and so we thought it would be funny to make up a bunch of words and come up with a definition.
IT’S SERIOUSLY FANTASTIC, IT’S A GREAT LAUGH.
SO YOU GUYS SORT OF WRAPPED UP LAST YEAR AND KICKED OFF THIS YEAR WITH THE BEST RUN OF GIGS, DO YOU HAVE ANY PLANS TO HAVE A SHOWCASE OR TOUR ONCE THE RESTRICTIONS LIFT?
Yeah well it’s still early days to be thinking about that, with us being in Melbourne and suburbs being locked down again, so we aren’t really sure when everything is going to happen, but definitely in the future we will be trying to do a good run of shows, in whatever capacity we are allowed to and hopefully we will be able to jump on some tours and stuff like that, once this has started to blow over and everything is contained again.
WELL LAST BUT NOT LEAST, WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR RAT!HAMMOCK, NOT IMMEDIATE BUT DISTANT FUTURE. WHAT ARE THE PLANS FOR THE BAND?
Well I mean again every band has the sort of six to twelve month planner out and all of the plans are down the tubes at the moment, and everyone’s just floating along trying to figure out where to go from here. We have a lot more time on our hands now so we are working on music again and we are going to be doing that for a long time probably. We’ll eventually want to get into more prolonged records, maybe start hinting at albums or extended pieces of music we can work on, and that’s all that we really can think about given the current circumstances, but obviously looking eighteen to twenty-four months ahead, hopefully we can start playing shows again and eventually going overseas and playing festivals, that would be something we would love to do.
Stream ‘Word Of The Day’ here.
