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The Hot Lies
 "We've always worked with people on our songs, like producers and stuff like that. It's awesome to get outside ears on your songs, and get opinions from people that you respect," The Hot Lies drummer Jared Brown tells me. "So we were tossing up a few names about who we might get to produce the album or do some pre-production with, and their name came up amongst a whole bunch of other ones. They had a listen to some of the demos, and they were like, 'we're not really keen to take on a big project like doing pre-production' - I think they'd just signed their record deal in the States, and they were pretty busy being the bloody biggest band in Australia. So they go, 'if you guys are keen to do something, why don't you just come over to Freo, hang out, and we'll just have a jam and see what comes of it; if we get some cool stuff out of it, awesome, if we don't, no harm done, you know?'"
Brown's talking about Adelaide screamo export The Hot Lies' new songwriting buddies - who, a fact which comes as a shock to me, turn out to be Western Australian radio-rock giants Eskimo Joe. Listening to The Hot Lies new album, 'Ringing In The Sane', however, it's not quite so confusing. The Eskimo Joe boys contributed directly to two of the tracks, Tokyo and Under Your Skin, but their influence can be felt across the disc - screamo this ain't.
The Hot Lies vocalist Pete Wood admits that the band's co-operative time in Fremantle had an effect on the course their debut full-length ended up taking. "Kav [Temperley, Eskimo Joe frontman] rang me a couple of days before I was going to Freo, and he said 'bring any riffs you've got, bring your demos, we'll just sit around and strum some songs out'. I think 'cos he was coming from a totally different spot than I was coming from, we had this like push and pull thing with the songs as we were trying to write 'em... I came back from there with a new outlook on songwriting. I definitely went back and re-wrote a lot of my parts on some of the earlier songs, just from what Kav and I talked about for those few days. I tried to write the songs around the melodies more, and I think the boys freaked out a bit - every jam I'd come to practise with a new change to one of the old songs.
"[Eskimo Joe] definitely had a freak out when we were demoing," Brown laughs about the arrival of the rest of The Hot Lies later in the process. "We were pulling the guitar tone, and they've gone 'yeah, how does this sound?' And we're like, 'oh, you gotta gain that up way more than that, dude, more distortion'. And they're like 'are you fucking serious? This is fucking insane!' And we're like, 'nah, this is half as much as what we use! Dude, this is not the indie world!'" he chuckles. "But, nah it was awesome man, like really fucking awesome dudes, heaps supportive, and just a cool opportunity. The record would have definitely not have been the same without that turning point and learning those lessons, so it was a really privileged thing."
However, The Hot Lies are quick to point out that the record's new sound, which sees Wood almost completely ditch his trademark scream and the band forge a frenetic but more pop-orientated sound around emo-less hooks, was a more natural result than I first thought. "There was a time when we put all the songs up on a whiteboard," Wood explains of the process of getting ready to go into the studio. "We picked our 12 favourites, and someone's like, 'oh they're the ones with no screaming in 'em. Do we need to go in and put in those parts?' That just seems such a fake thing to do, just to go in and put those things in there because people expect that of us.
"The whole thing for me when people scream in a band, the reason they're screaming is 'cos that's how they're trying to say something," Brown continues. "Not screaming for the sake of being heavy, just screaming 'cos that's how they want to say it.
"There's that cool Jimmy Eat World line where he says 'you don't have to scream to say something you really mean' [No Sensitivity]," Wood adds. "That hit home with me, years ago when I was hearing that. I was like, well, why do I get into this band when all the other bands I like are heavy? I realised they had just as much passion as these bands who I thought had more because they were screaming... We didn't really notice it happening, until we had that step back and had a look at it from a distance.
"We never really wanted to make the same record again," Brown points out. "We kind of felt like 'Streets Become Hallways' and 'Heart Attacks' were almost the same record. The way it hopefully works out is that fans of the band that want to grow with the band, they will. Hopefully the new album presents them with a whole other side of the band. With the two EPs and the album they get a pretty full picture."
And, despite the risks associated with such a marked change in style, The Hot Lies aren't worried about a possible backlash from fans. Brown, as is his way, just laughs it off. "With the biggest bands in the world, in the polls usually the hottest band of the year is blah blah blah, and then the most hated band of the year is the same one. Like, unless people hate you you're not really making an impact."
Wood laughs at that.
"I wanna be that band".
Matt Vesley
The Hot Lies launch 'Ringing In The Sane', out 15 Sept on Liberation, at The Gov on Fri 14 Sept with Mere Theory and The Open Season.
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