Harriette Pilbeam looks like a natural atop a precarious pile of pillows as a camera clicks in her face. The Australian singer and bassist known as Hatchie is in a sunlit Brooklyn apartment for her first-ever real photo shoot, but she poses like a pro. Pilbeam and her three bandmates are at the tail end of an American tour (another first), flying from Texas to Los Angeles to New York City in the span of a little more than a week. But if Pilbeam is feeling frazzled by her rapidly shifting world, she certainly doesn’t show it.
Following the photos, Pilbeam hurries to soundcheck at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge, where Hatchie are making their New York debut. In one smooth motion, she bursts through the venue’s doors, tosses her backpack aside, jumps on stage, slings on her bass, and launches into a song. Later, as Hatchie play their celestial dream pop, Pilbeam cracks jokes and seems fully at ease under her audience’s eager gaze.
On this chilly day in late March, the streets outside are still covered in snow from a recent storm; it’s a far cry from Pilbeam’s native Brisbane, a coastal city where the temperature rarely dips below 50 degrees. But Pilbeam isn’t much of a beach goer. Instead, she and her friends prefer to spend their time in the Valley, a Brisbane neighborhood where a tight-knit community of bands perform and frequently share members. Growing up, many of Pilbeam’s peers dreamed of ditching Brisbane for Sydney or London, but she was in no rush to leave. It seems fitting, then, that her music does the yearning for her.
Pilbeam attended a local college, where she majored in creative industries, a sort of arts-business degree. She had been quietly writing music on her own while playing in various Brisbane bands, but she largely kept that material to herself. Her friends urged her to record one song in particular, a twinkly number about a struggling relationship called “Try.” On it, beneath countless layers of caramelized harmonies and carbonated synthesizer bubbles, Pilbeam sings of searching for a sign of life in a lover’s sigh. It’s the kind of earworm that screams to be used in a sun-soaked teen romance. Pilbeam properly recorded the track in early 2016, only to sit on it for the next year as she finished up university and pondered her future. “I was going through a lot of transitions and endings,” she recalls. “I was waiting until I was a bit happier and more solidly into adulthood, not still feeling like a teenager.”
A year ago, on her 24th birthday, Pilbeam uploaded “Try” to Triple J Unearthed, a talent scouting project run by Australia’s national youth radio station that has boosted the careers of artists including Courtney Barnett and Flume. Soon after, “Try” became one of the top five songs on Triple J proper, leading to an avalanche of attention from labels, managers, producers, and international booking agencies. At the time, Hatchie had yet to play a single show.
Pilbeam quickly pulled together a band composed of her boyfriend Joe Agius on the acoustic guitar along with other friends from the Brisbane music scene. She says she finds comfort blending into a group: “I’m not a front person at all, and I don’t want to be.” But because Hatchie songs rely on her huge pop hooks, Pilbeam is unable to truly blend into the noise like members of some of her favorite reverb-soaked bands such as My Bloody Valentine and the Sundays.
Hatchie’s next track, “Sure,” a lush rumination on a precarious relationship, doubled down on the band’s good fortune. Like the Cranberries’ “Linger,” “Sure” transforms aching romantic betrayal into swirling resolve. The track even got a seal of approval from dream-pop originator Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, who remixed it into a drowsy fantasy.
The five tracks on Hatchie’s upcoming debut EP, Sugar & Spice, follow through with sparkly pop melodies and sassy candor. Each song is concentrated on romance, in the form of heartbreak, desire, and wonder, delivered with enough jangle to melt the iciest heart. The title track invokes the majesty of the cosmos in its quest for everlasting love, while “Bad Guy” treats the realization that some dude “never really wanted to talk anyway” with earth-shattering gravity.
“All of my songs usually start with a couple of lines that are very true, things that I think and write in my diary, and then the rest of the song isn’t really necessarily about me,” Pilbeam explains at a Lower East Side cafe, as two women behind us balance a point-and-shoot camera atop a stool to execute the perfect selfie.
Harriette Pilbeam: I fell in love for the first time over the last couple of years, which was a really pivotal thing in my young adult life. And I like that this EP covers a lot of different aspects of first love: Whether it’s the euphoria of feeling like you can’t live without somebody, or the feeling of somebody breaking your heart without breaking up. But I’m aware that writing songs about love and heartbreak is easiest for me, so I want to push myself a bit out of my comfort zone in the future. I don’t want to make the same album over and over again.
Just things that I’m not familiar with; I don’t think I’ve that many interesting life experiences yet. I’ve had an easy life. I’m a white person from an upper-middle-class suburb. My parents are still married. I’m in a long-term relationship. I’ve never had my heart broken. I’ve never had anything terrible happen to me.
Exactly, some people can write about a piece of paper, but the way they write about it is what makes it so special. That’s what I need to work on, how poetic my writing is as opposed to just explaining how I feel. I never really write situational or character songs, which is definitely something that I want to work on. I’m only just starting to write about other things.
I was initially drawn in because I couldn’t even figure out how they made the sounds. I’m not very good at guitar; I can’t create those sounds! I liked that it was different from anything I’d ever heard before. Like, it doesn’t necessarily matter what the lyrics are, but the vocals can still be the most beautiful part of the song. I liked that it doesn’t sound like there’s a singer and a guitarist and a drummer—it’s all just like this wall of sound.
I really like Wolf Alice, the Horrors, Alvvays, and Frankie Cosmos. [Alvvays singer Molly Rankin] is a perfect example of someone who talks about normal things in a really poetic way. It’s the same with Wolf Alice—when listening to most of the songs on their latest album, I was like, “Oh this has something that I can really relate to as a young woman.” [Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell] is an example of somebody who’s not super feminine and can subvert the idea of a pop star.
That’s definitely something that I’ve thought about a lot over the last couple of years. When I was in my early teens and toying with the idea of maybe wanting to be a singer one day, I was like, “Oh, but I don’t want to be a pop star. I’m not like that. I don’t look like that, I don’t sing like that. I don’t want to be like that.” I legitimately thought that was the only option. But when I got a bit older I discovered artists like Kate Bush or Siouxsie Sioux and I realized that you don’t have to be a pretty girl. You don’t have to sing about a guy breaking your heart to be a female singer. You don’t have to wear a dress.
