Interview with Quivers: ‘It’s such a different world now. It’s not just guitar bands, we’re so used to going down different rabbit holes.’

Melbourne-based indie pop band Quivers will release their second album, Golden Doubt, on 11 June 2021, a 10 track album of life-damaged jangle pop about putting yourself back together to be able to fall in love again.

Sam Nicholson (vocals and guitars) started the first Quivers songs in Hobart, Tasmania, with Michael Panton (lead guitar). When they moved to Melbourne, they got Bella Quinlan singing and on bass and met Holly Thomas (vocals and drums) through a mutual friend, Joanne. The band was formed around five years ago, although the current line up has been playing together for around two and a half years. Their name is a play on words, given that ‘quivers’ can reference several things, including a quiver of arrows.

Nicholson describes their sound as ‘traditional jangly guitar pop’: ‘We love a lot of bands from the 80’s and 90’s like The Chills, The Cure, The Pixies. I think we’re story driven but I don’t always realise until later what a song’s about and its meaning can change over time. If a song’s meaning is more elusive, it’s easier to go back to it.’
Last month, they released the first track from the album as a single, ‘Gutters of Love’, a song that moves from a chugging guitar to a full-throated shouting choir of Quivers’ friends.  It’s a song about trying to find love even when you’re not in the best place: ‘It’s about staying up to talk about love’ Nicholson said. ‘It’s like when you get thrown a curveball, when I lost my brother in the accident, so the song’s about if you’re sad, how can you fall in love and be present?’

His brother died in a free-diving accident and Quivers’ debut album, We’ll Go Riding On The Hearses (2018), is essentially about dealing with his loss.

‘The song was an attempt to bottle the feeling where you are overwhelmed and out of your depth with someone’

The next single, out April 21, is called ‘Hold You Back’. It’s a more abrasive and propulsive song that Quivers describes as ‘the rockiest one we’ve ever done, it’s got really noisy guitars and the strings are really vaguely disco’: ‘The song was an attempt to bottle the feeling where you are overwhelmed and out of your depth with someone or a situation. In awe of someone, but a bit lost by it all,’ he explained. ‘The chorus goes ‘I wanna hold you but I don’t want to hold you back’.’

Nicholson says the album is a lot more hi-fi than their first one: ‘We took more risks,’ he said. ‘We would have had it out a year ago but we had to cancel overseas touring and we couldn’t finish recording it. So we waited and waited and then put strings over three of the songs, including ‘Hold You Back’, but we didn’t want emotional strings, we wanted weird strings!’

‘You’re Not Always On My Mind’, a song previously released as a 7″ single, is a gorgeously jangly, bittersweet track about missing someone and being reminded of them in so many daily situations. ‘Videostores’, which will also appear on the new album, is about how society changes and taking a chance on someone. As it kicks off: ‘Goodbye horses, goodbye video stores, goodbye pay phones, no-one uses them anymore. I would call you, but I wouldn’t get through. I lost myself for a while, then I lost myself in you.’

We chat for a while about how diverse music has become and how many different types of bands have been emerging over the last year: ‘It’s such a different world now,’ he said. ‘It’s not just guitar bands, we’re so used to going down different rabbit holes.’

In December last year, they released their version of R.E.M.s’ iconic album Out of Time covering it in its entirety. The album marked the 16th release in Seattle-based record label Turntable Kitchen’s Sounds Delicious series of album covers. ‘I got in touch with them and they were quite supportive of what we wanted to do. I was obsessed with their Automatic For The People album as a kid but it can be hard to do a cover of something you know really well, so we thought it would be easier to do the earlier album, even though I don’t like ‘Radio Song’ and ‘Shiny Happy People’. Other songs, like ‘Losing My Religion’ are untouchable for me, it’s such a brilliant song, it’s timeless.’

‘With an album like this, you can’t try to be like R.E.M. or you’ll fail’

I tell him that I particularly like their cover on the album of ‘Half a World Away’, which they’ve reimagined as an acoustic version. ‘We stripped it back, it’s just me and Holly singing,’ he said. ‘There’s not much point in doing a cover that’s too close to the original. With an album like this, you can’t try to be like R.E.M. or you’ll fail. The one thing that I really love on it is Bella singing ‘Texarkana’. We all sing in the band, I’m the fourth best singer! It’s great to sing with your friends.’

Nicholson is a big fan of fellow Melbourne-based indie pop band, Cool Sounds: ‘They make awesome, eccentric pop, quite jangly but heaps weirder. I also really like Emma Russack’s album with Lachlan Denton (Take The Reigns, 2019) and Snowy Band.’

He cites R.E.M. as one of his formative influences ‘because it’s what you listen to when you’re 10’ as well as The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen and New Zealand rockers, Dragon. His singer to watch is Melbourne’s Hannah Blackburn: ‘She’s amazing, she sang ‘Tiny Car’ and she sings in the shouty choir on our next record.’

If he could hear their music on any TV show, it’s a tie between The OC and Six Feet Under: ‘The O.C. because there would be so many montages in need of an emotional song or Six Feet Under because it was a warm, funny, show about families and death that freaked me out and held me until the final episode, which I never watched because I didn’t want it to end’.

(Photo from left to right: Sam, Holly, Bella and Michael)