Automatic Charms Australia
Images Courtesy of Automatic.
Very quickly and seemingly out of nowhere, Automatic has completely and thoroughly won us over.
We aren’t sure if it’s Automatic’s danceability, their creative use of simple synthesizer techniques, or the undeniable endearment of their approach to songwriting, but we are very, very in love. Well, to say we are in love might be a bit intense, but this writer has been musically charmed.
LA’s favorite synth-trio is not only playing Splendour, but going on a wider tour of australia with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which makes perfect sense. The groups’ musical aesthetics, especially when considering Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ very new and very good album, align quite well, and with any luck, you’ll be able to catch both acts in sequence at this here big ole’ music festival (SITG) or at one of their many AUS dates (see below). This writer (me) had a very awkward zoom interview with the band, Halle, Izzy, and Lola, who were truly lovely, which you can read below.
How long have you been a band?
HALLE: About five years, since 2017
How’s that been going?
IZZY: It’s cool, it seems to be going alright.
It seems to be going pretty well. How did you begin?
IZZY: We just started to jam without any real intentions of this being a career career. We didn’t really know each other that well, Lola wanted to start a band without a guitar and I had been trying for a long time to have a steady project. We just kind of clicked and became really good friends, and now we’re going to Australia!
Why was not having guitar a point?
LOLA: I am always the most creative when I’m more limited, so it was kind of a way to create a prompt or something. It creates certain parameters to be creative, and that just helped me focus, you know? I always just like more electronic and beat-driven music.
What is your songwriting process like? Do you think that having those parameters helps you? Would you struggle if it was just a whatever thing with no rules?
LOLA: Maybe it’s because we’re around a lot of guitar music so there’s too much influence. Izzy plays guitar, so she was thrown into this band, and we were like, Izzy play synth now. There’s always an interesting outcome when you don’t know what you’re doing exactly. And we were all on the same level with our technical abilities in that way.
IZZY: I’m not a good enough guitar player where I would feel like everything I was playing was boring or cliché, and with a synth, you can literally just make a weird sound and go from there. It’s more experimental and lawless, for me.
Were you all playing in bands before this? Were you playing together?
IZZY: No, Lola was in a couple bands playing drums throughout her life, and I just really wanted to be a musician, so I just played with whoever for several years. I had a project where I was playing guitar, and Halle played bass in one other band, for one show.
I know you mentioned electronic music, but that’s a broad thing. Your sound is very niche. How do you think you developed your sound over time?
LOLA: I think at the beginning we had some different influences that shaped the sound, like ESG and Nice as Fuck and Craft Work and Suicide and Jesus and the Mary Chain and New Order. We’ve kind of evolved from there. All that stuff is kind of minimal, it’s got a lot of different sounds in it besides guitar and the normal bass drums guitar.
Minimal is a good word, but it’s also very gritty, it’s not very glimmery. Even New Order is glittery music, you guys are I think, not rougher, do you know what word I’m trying to find?
HALLE: We’re tough, we’re hard.
“Everyone is so into marketing and how they’re perceived, I just get turned off from like, ‘We’re synth-wave,’ you know, that kind of stuff is superfluous. We normally just say, it’s synth, drums, and bass, and now listen to our band. ”
Hard, yeah, super tough. If someone asked you what kind of music you make, without using the word electronic, what would you tell them?
HALLE: Hard.
IZZY: Really hard stuff. Not for babies.
HALLE: Not baby stuff.
IZZY: We’re self-taught, so there’s a more jagged edge to our sound, but it’s still minimal. With the self-diagnosed genre thing, everyone is so into marketing and how they’re perceived, I just get turned off from like, ‘We’re synth-wave,’ you know, that kind of stuff is superfluous. We normally just say, it’s synth, drums, and bass, and now listen to our band.
You have a really strong visual component and that’s also really niche, so I’m curious what influences came into that. I find it’s always challenging for bands to represent themselves visually, it can go really badly, it can be really whack. You guys have been able to not be whack.
IZZY: I think it’s about taste, you know.
What’s your taste? What do you get into, when you’re setting out to make a flier or an album cover or music video, what kind of stuff do you draw from?
HALLE: I always love classic 70’s punk aesthetic, but we don’t want to do that exact thing for our band. On fliers that I’ve wanted to make for us and one of the designs for the t-shirt, I really like the aesthetic of Raymond Pettibon. Small amount of colors, simple, but then inserting ourselves, which is a little more feminine than Raymond Pettibon. Izzy has a lot of good references for visuals.
IZZY: I’m blanking. I studied silent film in school, so I’m really into noir, abstract expressionism, German visual artists and the pioneers of that medium. Walter.. I’m blanking. There are a lot of animators that made really cool, minimal stuff. It fits the sinister edge that our band has.
A little bit sinister, that’s the word. If you think of stuff, can you email me that stuff?
ALL: Yeah, yeah.
LOLA: There’s a more recent one, Pagame Sorayama, he does the robot art. I don’t know much about him, but we can email it to you.
HALLE: In fashion, Thierry Mugler.
Oh yeah, I know this dude.
LOLA: Some retrofuturist stuff.
IZZY: You know the movie Metropolis from the mid-20s. But we don’t want to be too retro. That’s just cool shit that we like and we use it to make stuff.
LOLA: It’s always really hard to find the right person to make our art, actually.
Yeah, that’s why I asked about it. It’s very niche and I don’t draw a clear line to anything. I think that your visual representations are really specific and characterized to your music specifically.
HALLE: I feel like we just try to create a world that is ours, that relates to the music, so it’s good to hear that. We try to keep things in an aesthetic universe.
You’ve been around for five years now, as you said. What do you think your goals were when you started out, and do you think that they’ve changed over time?
LOLA: I think my only goal really was to tour.
IZZY: Ironic, now we’re in the prison of tour
LOLA: I feel like we’ve achieved our view of our goals. We’ve had such a supportive team and have had so many opportunities that go beyond what my goals were. I feel like I’ve achieved my goals.
Was the goal just to tour?
LOLA: Yeah actually! Just to start a band and go on a tour with my own band that I started on my own, with my own vision with other people. Not me joining another band.
Do you have new aspirations, has it evolved over time now that you're in a place where you’re touring the world, doing really well, without trying to flatter you, what do you think your aspirations for the band are now?
LOLA: I do have a silly goal, actually. It’s to play Coachella, I grew up going to Coachella, I’ve seen all my favorite bands there. I know it has changed a lot since the beginning but yeah, it’s one of my weird goals that I need to achieve.
IZZY: It’s not that weird, I feel like a lot of bands probably want that.
You can really shoot for the stars, I understand that you went there all the time, but Coachella feels very attainable.
LOLA: Yeah. Also I love the Red Rocks venue, I really want to play there too. What about you guys, do you have any goals?
IZZY: I think creatively I just want to make a really really good record again. Just writing music and having that be fulfilling, collaborating with people that I find really inspiring.
HALLE: Yeah definitely, a goal that I think I wanted in the beginning that I feel like we’ve accomplished is breaking up what I would normally see in bands. Being three women in a band working together, just being an example of women in music working together in a positive way.
What do you all do outside of music and how do you think those things influence or affect your music?
IZZY: We just got back from tour, so our life has been this band. I read a lot, I watch movies, I’m a film nerd. I just rescued a cat.
Oh hell yeah. From where?
IZZY: Outside, he was outside my apartment. His face was all gnarly. I paid like $1000 to get him all fixed and now he’s snoozing on my bed.
You paid $1000?
IZZY: I took him and they said it will cost this much or he’ll die. I couldn’t be like, okay die.
My cat had a ruptured kidney last summer and it cost me like 3500 to keep this goddamn cat alive. I don’t regret it, but cats are hardcore money pits.
IZZY: Also the vets, it’s a racket how much everything costs.
Do you all have cats?
HALLE: Yeah, me and Lola both have little dogs. I also just found a bunny in my neighborhood. I guess we’ve all rescued animals.
LOLA: Saviors of the street
When you say that you found a bunny, what do you mean you found it? Was it injured or did you just pick up the bunny?
HALLE: I found a bunny hopping around these parked cars, and I was like, ‘this is no place for a bunny’. This little 13-year-old boy helped me catch it, it wasn’t that hard to catch. So I’m pretty sure it was a lost pet. So now it’s just in my bathroom and I’m trying to figure out what to do with it.
So you took a bunny.
HALLE: It was loose on the street, someone let it loose on accident.
How about you Lola, any pets?
LOLA: Yeah I have a little dog named Tuesday.
How’s that dog doing?
LOLA: She’s okay, I think she has separation anxiety because I leave so much. But she has a good support group of family and friends.
Before we started, she was saying that you guys went to Australia in January, were there any highlights from that trip?
LOLA: Yeah, it was awesome. The shopping was really good, a lot of good vintage. We saw a bunch of bats. They fly every night in Melbourne, it was an overcast summer day and they were just flying. We had this balcony on the roof and we were just watching them for an hour. They were those fruit bats, they looked like mini wolves.
Damn. Thank you for talking to me for 20 minutes about fruit bats and 1920’s movies. I appreciate it.
See Automatic in a city near you at the dates below:
Wednesday, 19 July - Melbourne, VIC - The Night Cat - BUY TICKETS
Thursday, 20 July - Melbourne, VIC - MCA (supporting Yeah Yeah Yeahs) - BUY TICKETS
Saturday, 22 July - Byron Bay, NSW - Splendour In The Grass - BUY TICKETS
Monday, 24 July - Sydney, NSW - Hordern Pavillion (supporting Yeah Yeah Yeahs) - BUY TICKETS
Wednesday, 26 July - Sydney, NSW - The Lansdowne - BUY TICKETS
Friday, 28 July - North Fremantle, WA - Mojos - BUY TICKETS
This interview is a part of the Splendour Weekender 2023 which will be available to read and download at the festival and around the Byron area across the Splendour weekend.