Love, in Body Type‘s world, lives in the small stuff. The unglamorous, easily overlooked gestures that quietly hold a relationship together, or quietly give it away. That is the territory Sophie McComish mines on “Sick Bag,” the darkly comic track trailing the band’s new album. “This song is kinda the culmination of several relationships that ended up the same way actually, both my own experience and others I’d observed. I think that’s why the ink flowed so freely,” she says. “It’s very literal, and it’s quite beautiful the ways you express love when it’s so desperate, through song or sketch. Or even through ordinary ways like buttering your lover’s toast right to the edges, just how they like it. When those little things become lazy or burdensome, that’s when you know something’s off.”
That instinct for the small and the telling runs right through Tally, the Australian band’s third record, out July 24 via King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s p(doom) Records. It is a record about, in the band’s own framing, mundanity’s mystical implications, and McComish is happy to sit in that idea. “There is magic in the everyday, so they say. We’ve been doing this band thing for over a decade now, so it is deeply embedded into our every day (literally the group chat and my role in keeping it alive on a day to day basis is probably the bane of my bandmates’ collective existences). Choosing ‘Tally’ as the album title was actually Stella’s idea, but it felt apt for album 3, as a commemoration of our 10 years on this wild ride.”
The Stella in question is producer Stella Mozgawa, of Warpaint, who has also worked with Courtney Barnett and Kim Gordon, and who guided the band through sessions at Velveteen Laboratory Studios in Los Angeles. Most of the songwriting for McComish, alongside Annabel Blackman, Cecil Coleman and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums, was done before the band arrived, but the room still changed things. “We did most of the writing before we were in LA, but we definitely made some cool creative decisions over there under Stella’s guidance. In fact, a few of the tracks got complete makeovers. That’s one of the best parts of working with a producer, particularly when we are such a tight-knit unit. Letting someone else in to help turn the songs into what they become was a new experience for us and a very rewarding one.”
One of those decisions gave the record a new colour. “Stella just has an absolute wealth of fun tools in her literal and metaphorical shed. We’ve never really been in a position to experiment with synths before, but how could we resist? I think the Mellotron adds a really warm and vintage feel, something a little more ooey-gooey which is a nice contrast to Annabel’s fuzzy guitar.”
Tally also arrives with the band playing bigger rooms than ever, and the festival stages behind their last album, Expired Candy, clearly still loom large. Roskilde and Rock Werchter, in particular, have reshaped how McComish thinks about writing. “Two of my favourite shows ever! A bunch of people in the audience were wearing bootleg BT [Body Type] shirts at Rock Werchter, so cool and unexpected to see that on the other side of the world. Funnily enough, I think with previous albums we’ve tried to replicate the live energy in the songs; this time it feels a little more subdued. Maybe that’s a reflection of us feeling more comfortable in what we’re doing or something, more able to explore new sonic territory without risk of losing our audience’s attention.”
That growing confidence has come with a few surreal milestones. A London show turned into an encounter the band still seems to be processing, when Gina Birch of The Raincoats turned up. “Well, Gina is a world-class icon and The Raincoats are hugely influential so it’s probably one of the most meaningful things that will ever happen to us!! So surreal hanging out with one of our heroes in the green room, eating cake, shooting shit. What a dream come true that we can now call her a friend.”
If anything, a decade in, the appetite for learning has only sharpened. Body Type head to Europe this autumn supporting Courtney Barnett, adding to a run of stages shared with the likes of Sleater-Kinney and Warpaint, and McComish bristles at the idea that a support slot ever stops teaching you something. “No way! Every tour is different so it’s always a new experience and I wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve never supported anyone overseas before so the tour with Courtney is gonna be awesome. Our tour with Sleater-Kinney was cool because it was the first time we’d experienced an entirely non-male tour party. Hope to have more inspiring learnings like that forever.”
Ten years in, that is really what Tally is: a count kept, a reckoning made, the ordinary held up to the light until it starts to glow.
Tally is out July 24 via King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s p(doom) Records
Photos – Jack Saltmiras
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