New Music: Eliza Hull – Balcony

Balcony is a colourful and contemplative appetiser for the upcoming album from Australian artist, Eliza Hull.

If this is representative of what You’d Think We’d Be Used To Change By Now has in store for us, then we are in for a mighty fine selection of songs indeed.

Balcony, which includes a sample from Talk Talk’s The Rainbow, was written in collaboration with British songwriter and producer Liam Howe, founding member of Sneaker Pimps. Those two bands are good comparisons for the track; Mark Hollis’ seminal post-rock outfit had an innate ability for wrap psychologically complex themes around a pop-adjacent melody. Howe set a path for other bands to follow: dance music with inflections of rock and trip-hop, allied with contemplative lyrics.

Hull’s voice is her own here; you can hear the faint ghosts of 90s trip-hop in the arrangement, but Hull is akin to a torch singer here. The album gives Hull her first album co-producer credit alongside ARIA Award-winner Pip Norman and reveals a sound that is almost tactile in nature. Plush like velvet and fine like silk, I heard as much of Dusty in Memphis or Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) as I did contemporary contemplative pop. And that’s not a bad place to be indeed.

“Liam was like a mad scientist in the way that he works; he’s a quick thinker and was fully creative, straight away,” recalls Eliza about recording Balcony. “Liam sampled it up, added synths and guitars, and then I wrote the lyrics straight away and sang the song. The demo vocal is the one we’ve used; we did it all in a few hours. I brought it back to Melbourne and recorded live instrumentation with a string trio, guitars, and drums, bringing an organic, cinematic quality to the finished track.”

You’d Think We’d Be Used To Change By Now is out on the 4th of December and is up for pre-order on Bandcamp in digital, vinyl, and CD formats. Hull has two listening parties for the album, one on release day and another on the 5th of December. Get ticket and album news on her Instagram and Facebook pages.