Photo by Bianca Edwards
In his 2021 book titled The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, author John Koenig identified an intriguing phenomenon known as anemoia, which he defines as a unique form of nostalgia in which one aches, painfully, for a time or place one has never actually known, and memories of experiences never actually lived. Melbourne’s Hatchie (born Harriette Pilbeam) has caught a serious case of it. “I think music can unlock memories,” she confides. “I think it’s my teenage years and my early 20s that I really find I’m most nostalgic for. It’s not necessarily that I want to go back to them, it’s more just like something can instantly transport me back there. I think that’s really fascinating.”
On Liquorice (Secretly Canadian), her third album as Hatchie, Pilbeam captures that energy and runs with it. She breathes life into “Anemoia” with a passionate sigh, opening the album on a beguiling note. A sweet-faced strawberry blonde of 33 with an easy laugh and a radiant warmth, she still cherishes the sounds of her girlhood. “I think music can really take me back to being a teenager,” she says. “I think I often wonder about all of the different moments, like the butterfly effect moments that my life could have been completely different if I did or didn’t discover certain music.”
Though Pilbeam confesses she’s a “more a dream pop lover than a shoegaze lover” at present, she’s always infused plenty of shoegaze-oriented moments into Hatchie’s discography. Liquorice is no different. “Wonder” launches heavenward to Souvlaki Space Station as she channels echoes of Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Chapterhouse through a prism all her own. Yuck, Cocteau Twins, Cleaners from Venus and Wild Nothing also count among Pilbeam’s favorites.
“Yesterday, I was listening to Wild Nothing’s first EP, and that instantly took me back to being a teenager,” she reveals. “I distinctly remember being in my bedroom listening to it with fairy lights on my roof and all the lights off, spending my whole Saturday night discovering new music and feeling I had a whole new personality based on that music. I think it’s my teenage years and my early 20s that I really find I’m most nostalgic for. It’s not necessarily that I want to go back to them, it’s more just like something can instantly transport me back there.”
Memories remain a powerful catalyst for Pilbeam as she revisits the past she longs for. She was summering with friends in upstate New York when the new sounds that evolved into Liquorice first surfaced. “I had started writing a few ideas for the album, but nothing was really working,” she laments. “I was also really quite unhappy and quite dissatisfied with a few elements of my life, and I think I was just leaning into that feeling. I was looking up stuff about nostalgia and all the feelings I was having. I think I looked up missing someone you don’t know or missing something you haven’t experienced yet, and it came up with that. That really struck a chord with me.”
Nostalgia is a tie that binds Liquorice from beginning to end; on “Someone Else’s News,” Pilbeam yearns, as we all have at one point or another, to “rip it up and start again.” On the fanciful “Only One Laughing,” she laments, “I never knew that what once excited me wasn’t what’s meant to be.” For everything that wasn’t meant to be for Pilbeam there’s plenty that was, namely her relationship with longtime personal and musical partner Joe Agius, whom she wed in Las Vegas in 2021. (Is it heaven or Las Vegas? We may never know.)
“We’ve been working together for so long that we really have a shorthand for what we want to do with songs,” Pilbeam confides. “We’re really good at not stepping on each other’s toes. I think we just get it. I think we click. What we originally connected over was music, so that’s always been this common thread between us. We’re like a Venn diagram that crosses over, so working on this music is really that sweet spot right in the middle.”
The couple’s bond further deepened as they migrated to Los Angeles to record Liquorice with Jay Som’s Melina Duterte. “Working with Jay Som was great,” enthuses Pilbeam. “She’s super warm and caring, and that’s exactly what I wanted going into this. I wanted to work with someone who was a musician themselves in a band and had a similar experience to me. I just love that she’s a classic indie rock guitarist as well, so she added some really great shimmery guitars to the mix. We just had a lot of fun together.”
The relaxed vibe of the Liquorice sessions gave Pilbeam a perfect opportunity to explore her intimate side. “This one is a lot more romantic and sensual,” she muses, sipping coffee on this rainy Monday morning. “I really wanted it to tell the stories that I haven’t told about falling in and out of love when I was younger. It took a lot of inspiration from external sources as well, watching a lot of romantic movies and going back over those times in my life.”
Helmed by a vast group of co-producers and co-writers, Hatchie’s 2022 breakthrough, Giving the World Away, evoked the Nineties sounds that so profoundly inspired Pilbeam in her youth. The record scored her a Stateside hit with “Lights On,” a moment of clarity for an artist coming into her own. For the cover art, the photogenic Pilbeam posed in leather and a set of angel wings reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Juliet, an urban princess at one with the night. While Giving the World Away put Hatchie on the map internationally, she now views it through a different lens. “I did really work those songs really, really hard to the point where maybe they were overworked,” she reminisces. “I think listening back, there are a few songs that I always put too much effort into.”
By comparison, there’s a distinctly Spartan quality to Liquorice. Guitar effects and dissonance aside, each song delivers a clarifying sense of purity. “I really wanted this album, sonically, to be as simple as possible,” explains Pilbeam, “whereas with my previous album, I think I was really trying to prove that I could do something as complex as possible and as experimental for me as possible. This one, I tried to do the complete opposite and just slow down and work with my abilities.”
And Pilbeam’s abilities are legion, particularly her inventive knack for harmony, her dulcet singing voice and her effervescent joie de vivre. But Liquorice isn’t all sweetness and light, especially with respect to “Part That Bleeds,” a moody reverie that recalls a painful breakup: “We were written as a tragedy.” But the intervening years have been generous to Hatchie, bolstering Pilbeam’s confidence and building her creative strength. Liquorice offers a uniquely absorbing gaze into a multifaceted heart.
“I think I love how much of it is me,” she marvels. “Only ‘Lose it Again’ and ‘Carousel’ were songs that I fully cowrote with other people, and all the other ones are songs that I wrote pretty much fully. I really like that it feels totally mine. I know that I didn’t compromise at all with this one. I really stuck to my guns. I wanted it to sound fuzzy and DIY and romantic and emotional and sensual and a little more grown-up than my last album. I feel like I really did what I set out to do. I’m just really proud of that.”
