The Hard Quartet On Their Debut Australian Tour

The Hard Quartet have released their eponymous debut album on Matador Records / Remote Control Records and are currently on their debut Australian tour. The Hard Quartet are Stephen Malkmus, Emmett Kelly, Matt Sweeney and Jim White and have been described as an “indie super-group”. Hi Fi Way spoke to the legendary Jim White about the tag and their first tour as a band which starts in Australia.

It must be really exciting about to start the very first tour for The Hard Quartet right here in Australia?
Yeah, very excited. We’ve only done a handful of shows on the launch and this is the first tour.

Was Australia the obvious first sort of choice for destination for the band?
When the record came out and we did a show in Los Angeles, New York and London. Then it was like, okay, we kind of got told like because then the election happened or whatever, let’s just wait a minute. Then everyone’s like, you know, can we go to Australia! Is that a good time to go to Australia? And I was like, I think so. Everyone’s very happy to start here and it’d be good. This will be the first time where it’s a bunch of shows in a row. Everyone’s really excited about it and everyone loves Australia. I’m Australian obviously, but those guys all love Australia, love Australian music, Steve’s a big tennis fan. He’s psyched because the Australian Open is on.

How does it sit with you being described as an indie super-group?
It’s good to have that, at first it just seemed a bit weird. I’m glad people know we exist, talking about us and getting a chance to hear the record. Steve’s Steven’s really well known, but I don’t know if the rest of us are really, I don’t know what a super group is. We’ve got a long history. We’ve been around a long time. We’ve all done things. So, it’s not really for me to say!

How did you all sort of find each other? Was it just through touring, being in different bands and crossing paths at shows, festivals?
I think everyone’s got a history with at least two of the other people. From my point of view, recently, Emmett Kelly and I have a band called The Double. Recently we were the rhythm section do a lot of playing with Bill Callahan. Emmett came in and played bass on that record, so we met way back in 2006 maybe, we were both playing on a Bonnie “Prince” Billy record. We both have worked a lot with Oldham. Matt Sweeney and I go back to when The Dirty Three first went to America, I remember meeting him at the Middle East Club in Boston, it must have been after our fifth show in America. I live in New York, he lives in New York. We used to actually play together a lot. We played in different situations, with Will and different people, but also we used to just go into a rehearsal room and play with this Australian guy, Tim Evans from Tasmania and just play, we never played shows. We just would play and make cassettes and whatever we were recording on that at the time. Stephen and I go back to, I knew Pavement, I was a fan even before Dirty Three, when they first toured Australia. The Dirty Three and Pavement did a lot of shows together, we toured Australia, Europe, America, numerous times. I’ve listened to that music a lot.

I think the actual catalyst for the record was for the band was Matt Sweeney and Stephen Malkmus were working on a record, a Stephen Malkmus record. Then this idea came up and they approached Emmett and I. I think Emmett and Matt had played together a lot. Emmett is younger, he was a big fan of Pavement growing up. So yeah, it’s kind of really goes round and round. Then we had an idea, it took a while with Covid and it took a while to get together. We got together in the studio in New York to try it out. There was this studio that was closing down and we booked it for the last four days of the studio. Everyone brought some tunes along and we developed it and it sounded like something straight away. A bit of time passed, and we went out to California and got another session booked at another studio where you could stay there and finish the record. At that point we knew it was going to be a band, knew it was going to work and just kept it between ourselves and said to ourselves that we are a band. Then we gave it tot a label to see if they wanted it.

Did that take a bit of convincing to have the mindset that this is a band?
It was pretty quick. I think the vague idea was there from the beginning, but then it was being in the studio and feeling out how it was working and everyone’s intention. It wasn’t like one person’s thing, you know what I mean? Then we just talked amongst ourselves that was in the first few days. We were like, oh yeah, this has going to be a band.

How did the whole creative process work?
All three of those guys sing, ideas are brought in from half ideas to fully formed ideas, and then everyone brings what they bring to it. I think some of the songs Stephen might have had were more worked up, some might have been half ideas. In the studio there’s a lot of improvisation on those ideas. Not of talking about the process or the music or anything.

Were the any challenging discussions about the songs?
Everyone’s open, it wasn’t problematic and even if someone had an idea maybe of what they were expecting, they weren’t trying to impose that onto the process. Everyone wanted to play together and that’s why it’s a band rather than a collection of something else or some other intention.

What were the early jam sessions when creating the album?
When you go in the studio to play with people, everyone hadn’t played together and definitely not in this combination, there’s a question, is it going to work or not? So, it’s exciting that it worked. The song called Six Deaf Rats came up pretty quickly. It’s like, oh shit, it’s performance like that, this is the song that Stephen had brought started us off out in the playing in this way. We basically got together, and we played the first day, we set up playing through some ideas, and then from the second day we had the computer running, we were recording and then it was happening really quickly.

Are there plenty of ideas left over for a second album?
We’ve already started recording, not an album, but we got together to do something, we put a few ideas down. So yeah, there’s more in the pipeline.

Will you play the album start to end on this tour?
For the shows we’ve done so far, we’ve played all the songs on the record. We’ll get together in Brisbane to prepare for this and see what else we can do. It’s a double album, there’s plenty of songs. One aspect of the band is there’s these three amazing, really creative, great guitarists and then in each song, when someone’s playing bass something that really hadn’t crossed my mind at all was they all play really different bass styles. That really became apparent in the studio, but it became even more apparent live, it’s super fun aspect. They all seemed really excited about playing bass as well and are all great bass players and really different. It was fun watching Stephen move around the bass.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Hard Quartet on the remaining dates…

Tuesday 21 January | Fremantle Arts Centre | Fremantle, WA

Thursday 23 January | The Gov | Adelaide, SA

Friday 24 January | Theatre Royal | Castlemaine, VIC

Saturday 25 January | Northcote Theatre | Northcote, VIC

Tickets from Feel Presents…