Exclusive: Bachelorette track by track album guide

Grow Old With Me

"My initial guide track was a really cheesy choir sound from Logic. I used it to record the vocals along to and then replaced it with the Yamaha CS5 line. I always imagined the song with some washy guitars, so I asked my friend Nick Guy if he’d like to record some guitars for it. I was in NYC, he was in New Zealand, and we built it up over the internet. He recorded about 10 different guitar takes and let me edit them to the song as I saw fit."

The Light Seekers

"A friend of mine who works for Random House gave me a book about the Dalai Lama that they’d published. Reading it inspired the words to this song. It was the first song I started recording for the album, first in NZ and again when I was in the UK staying with my sister. I remember it felt so difficult to start the album. I played around a lot in Ableton, stretching and pitch shifting sounds and we arrived at this."

Blanket

"This was the other first song which I actually started recording in New Zealand. I borrowed my flatmate’s korg micro to record the synth sounds. The sounds inspired the vocals. The ‘blanket’ is a metaphor for depression, although I think it’s a happy sounding track!"

Bachelorette - Blanket by souterraintransmissions

Polarity Party

"Definitely a fun song which I recorded while staying with my Mum in Libya. She was a teacher at the Tripoli International High School, and I went there for a month to spend some time with her and check out the surroundings. It was the hottest month of the year though, so a lot of my time was spent in an air-conditioned room piecing sounds together on the computer."

Sugarbug

"This is pretty well-travelled: I started this in the UK, worked on it in Libya and Virginia and finished it in Brooklyn. I don’t want to reveal what the words are about because I think they could be interpreted in different ways. Dino Karlis played drums (in Berlin) and Andrew Bain played bass (in NZ)."

The Last Boat’s Leaving

"It’s a pretty simply arranged song, with words about how all my friends were having babies. It felt a bit weird that their lives were shifting in a different direction from mine."

Tui Tui

"I got the first 3 notes of the whistling melody from a bird that was living in the back yard of my house in NZ. It’s a native bird called a Tui, which has a beautiful call, but can also copy different sounds, like the bark of a dog or a car alarm. This melody is not its native call. I don’t know where it got it from. I played around on my new guitar with a looping pedal, along to the tune, and that’s how the song slowly developed."

Waveforms

"Recorded in Brooklyn, this is a love song to waveforms. The thought that it would be great if people could operate as purely as waveforms do: with no self-interest, with an innocence and purity of purpose. I used the CS5 again in this one."

Digital Brain

"This song was just pieced together over the space of the year. I was never able to work on it in very long bursts and I think it sounds like that. I really wanted the sound of the song to reflect the subject matter – samples being memories, building a person out of memories and a song out of samples."

Generous Spectre

"It’s super simple and minimal I think, and kind of funny and weird. Every now and then I come out with a song where I’m not sure why it is the way it is. It just forced me to make it sound that way through trial and error. The lyrics are about just kind of wanting to disappear and exist beyond the confines of the body/ego."

Not Entertainment

"I recorded the bulk of this song in Libya as well. I think the sound of it may have been partly inspired by seeing Neu play live when I was touring, at a festival in Tilburg, NL. It was the best show I’d seen in ages. In the lyrics, I’m having a dig and a laugh at myself being an ‘indie’ musician. It’s a pretty self-indulgent bourgeois pursuit and I think that was made more obvious to me when I got to spend time in a place like Libya!"

‘Bachelorette’ is released on May 16th on Souterrain Transmissions