Uncanny Valley, the sophomore album from Brisbane/Meanjin outfit Spirit Bunny, is a little musical curio. There are no guitars, but the sound doesn’t regret their absence. The band say they make “grit-hop” but some of these ten songs are infectious pure pop. Using a Casio and a Commodore 64 synthesiser backed only by drums, it’s a convoluted mess of beats that sounds coolly retro without ever sinking into tweeness.

Multi-instrumentalists Kate Thomas, Joel Saunders, and Cam Smith don’t wish to collaborate simplistically and their album is exploratory and inquisitive, taking myriad chances, finding energy in chaos. Their anarchic pop is surreal and uncompromising, whimsical and skillful.

The record moves between waves of emotions and atmospheres. There’s the upbeat bounce of ‘Paper Handshakes’ at the beginning, which soon evolves into the sweet ‘Sunday’ and the pulsating and melancholic ‘Risk Aversion’ (an ironic title for this group). When the trio do shift gears, their sound naturally becomes urgent and sinister; noticeably with the heaving industrial buzz of the delightfully named ‘Loop Fiasco’, followed by the eerie spirit of the slower ‘Fever Attack’.

The chaotic beats naturally intrigue but Smith’s lashing drum fills find their place under the twinkling touches, particularly on ‘Anacrusis Fiction’ and the powerful ‘Stomping’. It all ends with ‘Natsukashii’ - the Japanese word for when something evokes a fond memory from your past - and it’s the sentimental and contemplative closer that feels just right to tie everything together.

It’s rare that a record comes close to being unquantifiable, but Spirit Bunny’s sound is so individual that it’s difficult to draw comparisons with anything else. Not that one should: idiosyncratic and challenging music like this deserves to be held accountable only to itself.

Uncanny Valley came out last month via Zang! Records and we caught up with the group to discuss each track from the album in depth.

Paper Handshakes

Cam: This was one of the earlier songs that we wrote for the record, and straight away it seemed like an opening song. Lots of bounce, upbeat and catchy. It’s also a good example of how we used guests and instrumentation on the record - our friend Keeley (from Requin and Claude) plays some saxophone on it, in the form of a multi-tracked part that replaces and augments Kate’s Commodore 64 organ part. We liked the idea of using extra instrumentation not as additional adornment on top of what we play as a band, but instead replacing our parts entirely and adding sonic variety and texture.


Joel: When coming to write this new album I was really keen to include as much dual vocals as possible. It was something that we were only just exploring on our first album (see ‘Amen Skew’), but do a lot more on this record.

Anacrusis Fiction

Cam: I think this might have been the last song written for the record? Certainly amongst the last handful. We wanted another faster song, something a little bit frenetic. I really like the way that all three of us sing on this one, the vocal interplay is cool. In the second verse we wanted the song to feel like you’re speeding through a tunnel, it has this real sense of momentum.

Sunday

Joel: This is arguably one of the prettiest songs on the album. Minimal extraneous noises, circuit bent toys or weird atonal sections. That said, our “pretty” is probably most people’s “unusual”.

Cam: There’s lots of different textures on this one. Our friend Fionn (also from Requin, as well as Aren’t) plays cello on this, plus there’s mellotron strings and flute at the end to really make the ending epic. Again, this is one of the earlier songs we wrote for the record and it helped to set the tone for the album, that it was going to be a bit more spacious and perhaps emotionally affecting than the debut.

Risk Aversion

Joel: We often use our phones for quick demos when rehearsing. Kate played these really melancholic chords on her Commodore 64. When I listened back to the demo at home there was this simple pulse going throughout it too. We chopped the chords up a bit, made some sections, added some noise, and wrote some words about missing childhood. It is kind of the most simple song on the record, but it has all these shifting layers that come and go. When talking about this song we mentioned Xiu Xiu and The Breeders a lot.

Cam: It’s simple but complex. The chords are very straightforward, so the way for us to make it interesting was to have different elements constantly entering and exiting the mix. We never really play any section of the song the same way twice, it’s always morphing.

Stomping

Cam: This is one where we wrote virtually the whole song in a jam. Of course, the original jam goes for six minutes or more, and the parts weren’t necessarily in the order that they appear in the final song, but most of it is lifted fairly verbatim from that jam. It’s cool because there are parts that aren’t necessarily what we would write if we were to come up with them in a more composed manner, for example the kind of weird bass synth part that Kate plays in bridge between the second verse and chorus. Joel talks about how this song is about the draining nature of Brisbane’s stormy summers, but to me there’s also this undercurrent of commentary about our effect on the natural world that we’re a part of - the mixing of glyphosate and petrol fumes with your morning coffee while tending to the garden. Joel often comments that he writes these songs without necessarily intending to reference these bigger issues, but it’s often plainly obvious to Kate and I what the subtext is. That said, a lot of the songs on this record are a lot more explicit in their meanings.

Loop Fiasco

Joel: I play these cheap mid-80 Casio keyboards that were meant to be toys, but have these noisey little samplers that means they ended up being used on everything from hip-hop classics to noise records. I’ve added circuit bending patchbays on the side that means I can craft even weirder noises from the keyboards, and for this song I created a patch that crashed my keyboard and made the same weird rhythmic loop regardless of what key I pressed. We recorded that loop and wrote a song around it.

Cam: Although we all live in Brisbane now, we spent a lot of our formative years in the country, in various farming and mining towns, and still have family who live in those environments and work in those industries. I have family members who could literally light their taps on fire due to fracking leaks, so it’s not just a song about something we saw on The Project. Musically I love how noisy this song is, it’s maybe the most abrasive thing we’ve done? It reminds me of Björk when she gets pretty out there, like on a song like ‘Pluto’ from Homogenic. But then in the middle it’s got this weird little synth solo from Kate that takes into a totally different territory, before blending it all together at the end.

Fever Attack

Joel: This track stands out on the record for obvious reasons. It’s one of the slower, more spacious and longer songs, and Cam sings the lead vocals.

Cam: This was another one written out of a series of jams, largely based on a particular setting on Kate’s Commodore 64 - which we then replaced for large sections of the song with big, distorted piano chords. It’s basically just two chords for six minutes, so much like ‘Risk Aversion’, the key to making it interesting was to keep the textures and dynamics constantly morphing. We love a lot of trip-hop, so wanted to take this into a real Portishead, Massive Attack kind of place. At the end it all starts to deteriorate, and the drums go into what we called “the Todd Trainer (of Shellac) section”. It’s a lot more stretched out than anything we’ve ever done before, perhaps the only thing that’s remotely like it is the song ‘Gold & Brown’ from our first record.

Gargamel

Cam: For a long time this was a song that no one dared to bring up at rehearsal. It was either the first or second thing we started working on after the debut, and one of the last things we finished. It literally hung around for years unfinished, which is rare for us. Usually when we start working on an idea we can get it into some sort of shape pretty quickly. We just couldn’t make it work, it was a cool riff that we couldn’t turn into a song. In the end the key was to simplify it a bit, we were trying too hard to make it into something that it didn’t want to be. The middle section with the ascending chords is such a nice moment, with the vocal harmonies - it adds such a respite from the relentlessness of the rest of the song. We got all of the guests on the record to play on this - Keeley, Fionn and our friend Luke, who plays trumpet in one of my other bands, Ghost Notes. They add lots of skronk in the background.

Bindii

Joel: I wrote the lyrics to ‘Bindii’ after a hiking trek in the blue mountains. It was in the middle of a heat wave and we did an overnight hike. At the end of the first day there were these beautiful pools we could swim in and a rope-style bridge made from what looked like scaffolding and industrial waste.

Cam: This has my favourite drum fill I’ve ever played, in the stabby breakdown towards the end. It still brings a smile to my face. The song has a weird vibe: kind of menacing, kind of wistful, and then with this slightly whimsical ending.

Natsukashii

Joel: The most sentimental song on the album. Even before the lyrics and vocal melody were written, this track’s chord progression and timbres conjured up dimly lit rooms and sitting in mid-century chairs drinking whisky.

Cam: A lot of side two of this album is pretty intense, and this is the ray of light at the end. I think it’s the best song that Spirit Bunny has written. It means a lot to us all emotionally, but especially for Kate - she brought in the initial chords that got us started, and she’d written them thinking of a friend of hers. The buildup at the end, with the cello playing the bass line and the duelling keyboard melodies, it’s such a magical moment. It was always going to be the closing song on the record.