Cut Copy have been building and riding a wave of good will ever since their debut album Bright Lights, Neon City came out in 2004 to universal acclaim. Now they’re back with Free Your Mind, complete with a video to the lead single starring Södermalm’s own Alexander Skarsgård.
Where their last offering Zonoscope smoothed their dance-rock template into a groove-based synth-pop sound, fed on a diet of classic 80′s 12 inches and self-imposed isolation, their new effort Free Your Mind, perhaps a natural progression, has gone a bit more hippie and turned them into a modern clone of the Madchester wave of late 80’s-slash-early 90s. It offers influences from the likes of Happy Mondays, 808 State and the Stone Roses served up in a newly washed, streamlined and brought-up-in-an-academic-middle-class-background version, coupled with some flowery psychedelica and some last remnants of bombastic synth pop with catchy hook, line and sinkers.
Their much-heralded live shows will probably elevate even higher on the back of it and I know where we suggest you should be on December 10 when they hit these shores.
In the meantime we spoke with guitarist Tim Hoey about rockumentaries and underappreciated Aussie bands.
The documentary about Zonoscope really reminded me of watching [Wilco documentary] I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, except minus all the drama.
Yeah, that’s actually one of my favourite documentaries. We certainly didn’t have the intense lows that they went through making that record! We’re always watching those “Making Of…” films, regardless of who it is, it gives a really unique insight into how a record is made.
One part shows you picking out records for each other, are you all collector nerds when you’re on tour?
Exactly – that’s pretty much exactly what we do on tour. Every town we’re in, we’ll go and find the second hand record stores. I still love that ritual of digging through crates of records, finding that diamond in the rough.
As Australian musicians, do you feel in anyway distant from America or Europe?
We always had the intention of taking our music overseas because when we started out, rock was kind of the flavour of the month and it was really tough for us to even get played on radio or to get on festival bills. We were gaining a bigger audience overseas, triple what they were in Australia and then a lot of that started to feed back. It’s a very common theme in this country. I can think of a lot of examples like The Avalanches, The Go-Betweens or Severed Head where they blew up overseas before things really caught on here at home. They actually have a bridge named after them in Brisbane now, the Go-Between Bridge! IL
Cut Copy will be at Södra Teatern on 10 December.
