BODY TYPE RELEASE “EXPIRED CANDY”

captured by Toni Wilkinson

It’s only been a year since our favourite rock band Body Type graced us with their debut album Everything Is Dangerous but Nothing’s Surprising. Since then they’ve been on tour with rock royalty The Pixies, they’ve also been on tour with Fontaines D.C., and they’ve also just announced that they will be supporting Foo Fighters (yes, Foo Fighters!) in Adelaide later this year. Amongst all this they’ve very impressively managed to complete their second album Expired Candy which was released on Friday. The album is beautifully real, all about “not being so certain that confinement and desolation lead to a dead end. Instead, stagnation may serve as the perfect breeding ground for joyous bewilderment and an inflamed imagination.” Filled with the ever iconic Body Type driving guitars, they’ve produced a sound that sounds like a more comfy, more confident, and post punk side of themselves.

We took some time to catch up with 2/4 of the band: Sophie and Georgia. We chatted about the unique creative process of how the girls went about writing their new album, what star sign they believe the band to be, and how they’ve grown together as the ultimate dream team they are.

WANDERER: It feels like it's only been a few weeks since you've released your debut album, but really it's been a year and you're now onto the next album. You haven't really stopped for a breath, how do you feel about releasing Expired Candy compared to Everything Is Dangerous but Nothing’s Surprising? Does it feel different? 

SOPHIE: I feel really proud. I feel like we're challenging the norm [that] you put out a record and then you’re dormant for a few years while everyone digests that record. King Gizzard [and the Lizard Wizard] is the band that comes to my mind who spit out records like, freaking, two a year, sometimes. And they don't seem to be constrained by any norms or expectations or traditional release cycles. So I feel stoked that we just spat out another one as well. I feel really proud. 

And with the last album you had to hold onto it for a while, with the whole pandemic [delaying] everything. Was this album a quicker process in terms of pressing go on everything or did you hold onto these songs for a while beforehand? 

GEORGIA: No, it was definitely much faster. We finalised recording the whole thing in December last year. So, [that's] a turnaround of less than a year, and that includes getting mixes, doing all the finals, mastering it, getting all the assets organised and stuff like that. So it's completely different, it's been a bit more of a whirlwind really, which probably suits us more. We're a little bit manic by nature. 

You work a little bit better under pressure? 

G: I don't know if it's by choice. I think we've grown to be that way and haven't really had a choice and now we're like captives.

S: Do you think we're an Aries as a band? 

G: I think maybe we're a Gemini. 

S: Whoa! You think we're an air sign? Huge.

G: But think about it all, I think Body Type is a Gemini. 

S: Wow. Do you know what? None of us are air signs. Together, we are an air sign. 

G: That's what I reckon. 

S: Whoa, Georgia.

What signs are each of you guys?

S: I'm a quadruple Virgo. 

G: I'm an Aries. Cec is a Scorpio and Annabel's a dirty Taurian...or an Aries. She's on what some would call a cusp. 

S: Well if she's a cusp, then I'm on the cusp, and I'm a Virgo Libra cusp. 

I wanna quickly say something about the recording process because, you guys recorded Expired Candy at Stranded [Recording Studios] which is in the same warehouse as our studio, and I remember when you guys were recording, you had this really crazy chart that I couldn't help but walk past and see and be like, what is going on with that?

G: That's the quadruple Virgo that we've got. That's actually something that Soph dragged into one of our very first recording sessions and it's been there ever since. And it works, it's so useful to have because otherwise you would not know your Arthurs from your Marthas. 

S: You gotta know your Arthurs from your Marthas in this life. If there's one thing you gotta know, it's that. 

Yeah!

G: Yeah!

S: Your drums from your bums! 

Have you guys used that consistently throughout recording all your material?

S: Yeah, I guess we did it for the last record too. It's just really good to visualise where you're at in the process of recording and what still needs to be done, and then you can celebrate your progress.

I remember walking past it and a friend in the warehouse was like, 'Have a look at this, this crazy, weird thing, can you figure that out? I'm like, no way! It was pretty funny. Are there any new creative processes that you trialed that were different from the last time? Or anything you experimented with? 

G: Yes, certainly. This time we actually did a fair bit of writing in the room which turned out to be beneficial in a lot of ways because, if something wasn't moving in the right direction then we could problem solve with our trusty sidekick, the whiteboard, in the room. Like, that's really nice because even though we worked quite fast, it's always good to know that you have a little bit of leeway to change stuff if it's not quite working. Whereas, for our debut album everything had been played so many times that we went in there and we stuck to it. So it's nice to have a bit of flexibility. 

S:When you've also got one whole album under your belt you feel some sort of conviction that maybe you didn't [feel] the first time. I don't wanna say it's more confidence, I don't wanna sound egotistical, but you've ripped the bandaid off so there's more room to experiment and just more conviction in what you're doing. 

And you're heading off to Europe soon. Have you done anything like that before? 

S: We've got a tour manager this time. Last time we didn't and, let me tell you, that was really hard. So thankful for Dave. But yeah, we went over in 2019 and did South by Southwest in the States and then Great Escape in the UK and then a tour around that. But we hadn't even put out the first record at that point, so that was on the back of the EPs. This one we've got a lot more material [for].

Are you excited? 

S: Oh, I just can't believe it's happening. 

With the album, I love the twelfth track: ‘Dream Girls’. It sounds special. Can you share anything about it? 

S: It's so nice in interviews that everyone seems to be picking out different songs that they like best, which is really special, it means that all of them have things. Anyway, ‘Dream Girls’ was a song by Annabel, she wrote the lyrics to that one. I always feel funny speaking about songs that the others have written but it's a beautiful song and I know that it's a special song because I think she wrote it about the three of us. I think it's like a love song to the three of us, which is really special. 

I can tell you about writing my guitar solo for that one because, even though it seems like a simple song, there's a guitar bit in that song that took me so long to get it right because I couldn't ever remember what it was meant to be. And then I tried to double track it and it just took so long to try and do it. I think everyone went a bit crazy when I was trying to do that. When you're in the studio and you get to the last songs, everything just goes and your brain sort of stops functioning as you want it to and everything just gets a bit tweaked. I think that's where I was when I was recording the guitar for that one.

Is there any particular song for you guys that you each love for whatever reason? 

G: I've been listening to ‘Shake Yer Memory’ a lot and I've also been listening to ‘Albion Park’ a lot. It's quite funny, we share a lot of music and Annabel put a playlist together for me and, one of the songs by Royal Trucks that's on it, [when I listen to it] now all I can hear is Albion Park. And I don't even know if she based it on that, but you know sometimes you sleep and then you dream and then you wake up and you write something and it sounds like something you heard six months ago. 

And with ‘Shake Yer Memory’: it's just really beautiful to be able to observe other people in the band writing things and their own trajectory in writing and I think that's been really special. I frequently joke that Soph has been my teacher because I didn't know what an e chord was before starting Body Type. So Body Type's been my musical training for sure. So, listening to these songs now is quite interesting—seeing where we once were and where we are at now. 

S: I think my favourite song is probably ‘Holding On’, the opening track, mainly because Georgia and I wrote that together over voicemails deep, deep in the lockdowns and I feel very, very privileged to have someone like Georgia in my creative sphere where I can just be like, 'George, I've got these chords I need some lyrics. What have you got?' I do that all the time and somehow...

G: It just works. 

S: And because we're both writing about different things, they're very emotional, sentimental songs that result. 

G: It's quite a strange thing to do, to collaborate with someone on a personal song, but then it's also the most normal thing in the world. It is odd but it makes them more layered, which works for us. 

Do you guys collaborate on every song, does one person ever just write the whole song for you, or is it all melded and collaborated on together? 

S: I would say increasingly more collaborative. The person who sings the majority of the song is ordinarily the person that's brought the demo and brought the idea, but then everyone is very generous—I'm not sure if that's the right word—but everyone writes their own parts for every song. 

It's so cool how you guys wrote a song by voice-messaging each other. That's such a unique way to collaborate, and then to also make it the first track of the album, it shows a lot about you guys and how you all work together so well. 

S: I found the original exchange recently and it sounds kind of exactly the same. 

G: That's so funny. 

S: The first time you wrote back, Georgia, you wrote back the melody with you singing it and it hasn't really changed. But you said it sounded like The Jesus and Mary Chain at the time. Maybe that changed a little bit. 

G: Maybe that changed.

Have a listen to their new album and be sure to catch the girls for their national headline tour around Australia in August or if you're in Europe or the UK Body Type are making it your way in June/July this year. Head to their instagram to keep up with all the dates!