As a new music blogger, writing about 'new' artists can sometimes feel a little bit perverse when they already have over a million streams on Spotify. Yet statistics can tell a lie. A music maker can find themselves on a couple of Spotify Official playlists like ‘Dinner with Friends’ or ‘Your Favourite Coffehouse’ and rack up the plays so quickly it can make them seem as if they're established and well known. Yet go and watch them play in a small club to a half full audience and you’ll quickly realise that the internet creates a different reality to real life. For every active engaged listener there will be many using playlists for passive background listening and never going beyond that. And the chances are even when a song has found some 'real' fans, there will be many more music lovers out there who haven’t discovered the artist yet.
At least that’s my hope in writing about Australia’s Hatchie, otherwise she's not really new to anyone. She's hit over a million plays with her debut single Try and followed it up relatively recently with the hooky and melodic dream pop of Sure, a song about an indecisive relationship break-up: “You say you want it to be over, but is it ever really over?” she questions on the song, which falls somewhere between the more mellow parts of Wolf Alice’s output, the jangly guitars of The Cranberries (RIP Dolores) and lots of indie bands from the UK in the 80’s such as The Cocteau Twins. It’s rather lovely. More than lovely in fact. It’s been on rotation at Breaking More Waves HQ for the last few weeks and I keep coming back to it.
Hatchie (real name Harriette Pilbeam) lives in Brisbane and also plays in the band Babaganouj. Her debut EP Sugar & Spice is due this year, she’ll be playing SXSW festival in Austin Texas and readers in my home country may also be interested to know that she’ll also be coming to the UK for a number of shows in Spring.
Hatchie - Sure (Video)
Hatchie -Try
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