“In fairy-tale logic, you must trade something for something you desire.” So asserted MacArthur-wielding playwright Sarah Ruhl, quite wisely, and so knows any soul who has paid the necessary sacrifice of a spiritual crossing in this life or any other. Back with their fourth studio record and first star-transmission from the phonic planet known as Space Island, New Zealand’s most bodacious brother and sister band, BROODS, have written a record that unflinchingly avers the rare wisdom to be gleaned from willful surrender and the inviolable power to be found in overcoming our human horror vacui (fear of the void). What BROODS gave for the revelations and manifestations they have made into stone calendars on Space Island is deeply, bravely, and terribly personal – as will be what any listener receives upon hearing this record with the same kind of courageous openness.
True to their band name’s ingenious double meaning in both complete ways – siblings who are no strangers to proper internal espionage-of-the-self – Georgia and Caleb Nott have always been in the business of being bold enough to run on the rubble and sing to us about what can be culled out of all the cracks in our concentration. Those who have been avidly following BROODS since their inceptive Evergreen in 2014, with its Doppler shift of a debut hit entitled “Bridges,” know that their way of tailoring songs is as a kind of storied landscape, subversive and always leading to a rollicking elevation utterly their own.
Conscious, their galvanic sophomore album of 2016, securely solidified the eminent fact that BROODS is a band not of the austere electronica electorate. Their brand of beat is more like tiered chiffon, photogrammetry, or loc sculptures, art forms that change hue and depth the longer you observe. BROODS albums are all sonic ideograms leveling their Gothic best at the high-ceilinged drawing rooms of your gloom-electro heart. By 2019’s Don’t Feed The Pop Monster, they had outdueled the limiting expectations and delirium-inducing demands of the industry and began to show, in earnest, exactly what kinds of shattered silk they were capable of when they felt fully innervated to show up only as themselves.
Space Island is an incantatory album through and through. It is a fable about pluck and the reconfiguration of the ramparts of the heart, swimming with suave, modern juxtapositions that seem as though they spin out across ancient Kilim carpets. There can feel a tendency in many records centered on suffering to become muskegs populated by multi-barbed pictoglyphs of the anguish itself, or for the lyrics and sounds to simply chase those elegiac excess moments from before the fracture and its torts. In Space Island, BROODS have created a kinder novelty. It is grief put through a glass armonica, all the dizzying ephemera of eroding emotion seated in a fiberglass chair. They do not take the sadness and turn it all into shrines. All the dark parts have been made into Vibram or black tahini – something useful or positively repurposed rather than wastefully consigned to the capsule of feeling those shade-dwelling things arrived in. There is a concision to this record that is reminiscent of Giger’s paintings of New York, except all the virtual asphalt in Space Island is spilling grasses and foxcotes.
Each of the ten individual songs on Space Island is a dainty dose of permanent fine art. “Piece Of My Mind“ starts off nearly like chamber-folk, and then Georgia Nott smokes it out with the church incense issuing forth from her chest and it becomes choral psychedelia set in colorful skylines from worlds beyond. “Heartbreak“ is a piece of interstellar sacred text so entrancing as to make all previous dream-state despair songs appear vain and jealous interlopers. Georgia’s vocals here are hypervivid, gooseflesh-inducing, and vertiginous, shimmering past like rhino rays under dappled water. She is a hamadryad in a decibel of neon to cow Vegas, and you’ve certainly heard nothing so aquafrost-on-obsidian since Sinead O’Connor deliquesced into your daydreams for all time with “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
“I Keep (feat. Tove Lo)“ feels like a graphene nature study in merging the robotic with the organic. There are places in the combined harmonics of these two cybernetic water witches where it sounds like the indigo imprint of spiderwebs, and others where the curves in their chorus conjure more the curled horn of a Dall sheep – both a weapon and a marvel. Much like the parts of the heart we all ought to keep.
The BROODS brood was recently kind enough to let QRO almost make them late for another interview as we talked a mile a minute with Georgia and Caleb on matters of great importance, including neoprene wetsuits, grief hangovers, the mental tales of madcap directors, and finding Space Island, both literally and figuratively. They were glowing at the beach in New Zealand and we were glumly sitting in the East Coast rain, but somehow their Southern Hemisphere sunshine got all over this conversation – thank Aotearoa!
QRO: Thank you guys so much for Zooming in to do this today as I know you have so much on your plates with the release of Space Island – which I have to tell you that I have been all over like nobody’s business. I think you’re hitting a magnetic new stride here.
Georgia Nott: Yessss! Thank you so much. I love that you are enjoying it.
QRO: It’s addictive! As a listener, I’m interpreting Space Island as a place of creative isolation, perhaps even useful loneliness at times. I’d love to hear how you, the two true inhabitants of this lovely liminal space, interpret this idea and why it was important enough to become your new record’s title.
GN: I explained it the other day in a way that I was pretty proud of, just this whole juxtaposition of ‘space’ and ‘island’ – space being the vast endlessness of our consciousness and the finite nature of an island. Smooshed together, that just seemed like the whole experience of grief to me. It really forces you to confront a lot of things like loneliness, but also your connectedness. It has this strange way of making you feel like you are so alone because you are the only one in your body, but also so connected to everything because of this universal experience of trying to grapple with loss and the impermanence of everything.
Caleb Nott: Being stuck on a little island, in your own little world, where only you can experience what you’re experiencing while everyone else is just living their life like normal. Like, “how are you happy right now?!” [laughter]
QRO: [laughter] Do you know one of my friends in New York said something almost just like that to me once, but in the context of a hangover? I was very nearly dead one morning because I had pretended the night before like I could keep up with some of my East Village folks. He was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and he goes, “You know what’s funny is that we are standing next to each other right now, but isn’t it amazing that you’re in a totally different world from me!” [laughter]
GN: That’s exactly what it’s like! And a hangover is another really good way of describing it because time is the only thing that can heal a hangover. Sometimes you can try to trick yourself by getting up early and doing stuff, like “I’m not hungover!,” and in the afternoon you’re just like, “My god.” [laughter] It’s the same with heartbreak. My experience of loss and grief is that I go straight to, “I’m good! I’m fine! I’ve got everything together! I’m strong…”
CN: Annnnnd?
GN: Annnnd… I’m fucked! [laughter] Then, I crash so hard. So, it feels like a really long, two-year hangover.
QRO: I can completely relate and understand that! Here’s something I will throw into the mix – and let it be known I do notoriously say this to almost every Australian or Kiwi band that I meet – but it’s the complete truth as I’ve observed it: I feel like there’s something that happens in the bubble of creativity that is your region, and the distance that you have from everybody else who might be doing what you’re doing. I feel like you get a better connection to your creativity in a way because you are isolated, geographically.
CN: Yeah! I mean, even if you go into Australia, the best bands are all from Perth – the world’s most isolated city! There are just heaps of great bands from there.
It was this completely different experience of just going out and finding Space Island within the nature of New Zealand, building it shot by shot.
QRO: I can’t actually believe you’ve just said that because I say that all the time – and I love Perth bands so much that it’s just a constant laughing point for anyone who knows me and wants to take the piss! Now, that said, I have to tell you that the first band I outright adored from your lovely island was The Datsuns, and I maintain that “MF From Hell” is the second most romantic song ever written, right after “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS – still more Australians! [laughter]
CN: Oh man, The Datsuns’ latest video is so cool too! The same director that did our three-chapter Space Island videos did their latest vampire film.
QRO: No way! So, they got Sam Kristofski too!
GN: Yes! He’s just incredible.
QRO: I am extra glad we just insta-segued into these videos guys, because – first off, let’s not even call them “videos” as it is actually dismissive in this case. Let’s call them movies, because that’s exactly what they are!
CN: [laughter] Good, that’s what we wanted!
QRO: Man, you sure got it! Talk to me about working with Kristofski because he’s obviously highly visionary.
CN: He’s very dedicated to his art…
GN: He’s so on a different plane from everybody else, but it’s because of that, I think, he makes such new and interesting things. It was just so much fun. He’s an amazing storyteller! Face to face and through his art.
CN: His life’s just mental! [laughter]
GN: His life is mental! His stories are ridiculous, and some of them I’m like, “I have no idea if any of this is true, but I don’t even care!” [laughter]
CN: But it all is! He hunts out situations I reckon, and gets himself into sticky situations on purpose for the story.
GN: Yeah, all for the story! The way that we made our videos with him was, basically, just us three. The large majority, especially that first chapter, was all in the South Island of New Zealand. We just drove around for two weeks, shot in all these different places, and had these long drives where we talked about Space Island and everything else under the sun. It was just so nice to have that.
CN: And to build that real friendship over that experience as well.
GN: Yeah, real bonding time. We just had a camera, and Caleb was carrying all the reflectors, and I’m just walking around with bare feet in that red spacesuit, smoking spliffs and being like, “That’s sooooo Space Island!” [laughter]
When you allow yourself to be affected by things, you end up connecting with people on a much deeper level and have a richer experience of life. That is the reward for feeling your feelings: greater connections and better relationships.
QRO: In particular, I’ve noted the presence of the car with Georgia as a passenger, driving through what some might describe as a “deserted” landscape. I would argue that these sort of Mars-inspired scenescapes are quite rife with living elements. Is there maybe an underlying message in this album regarding the sort of sci-fi way that we as humans perceive emptiness? Also, Georgia, you’re seriously channeling a beautiful bit of Ziggy and his Spiders from Mars in your space suit and gorgeous orange hair, which means I must ask: is the great, original starman at all an influence on the visual atmosphere here?
CN: I was watching a lot of old sci-fis during the lockdown of 2020. That was very much a world I was escaping to. So, I made Sam watch a bunch of films that I was watching, then he sent me a couple, and he has obviously been itching to do something in that world because usually he only gets to touch on a little bit of sci-fi in other people’s films or whatever, and he was like, “I get to do three?!” [laughter] He was really pumped, and when we saw that enthusiasm and excitement we just kind of let him go a little bit. Like Georgia said, a lot of it was just done off the cuff and improvised. Film jazz! [laughter]
QRO: Muddled arpeggios!
GN: That was a really cool exercise in trusting the process..
CN: Because you can’t see any of it as it’s all shot on 16mm film.
GN: Previously, doing videos has been such massive productions over in L.A. with trailers and everything – so scheduled and quite rigid…
CN: And cost a billion dollars! [laughter]
GN: Yeah, and cost so much money! For the same budget that we’d have for one video over in the States, we did three.
CN: Sam was like, “Can we spend 60 bucks?”
QRO: My goodness, so you’re just in a different world!
GN: Yes! It was this completely different experience of just going out and finding Space Island within the nature of New Zealand, building it shot by shot.
CN: Sam is such a cowboy that he’s just like, “I can do it on my own! I need a crew for like one day.”
QRO: I love him already! So, all of this mesmerizing magic was just you two and Sam. Unreal.
GN: Yeah, the first chapter was all done just us on the South Island of New Zealand; for the second chapter we got this amazing animator, Dr. Foothead. A Kiwi as well! He is also a really beautiful storyteller and when he told us his treatment for the “Heartbreak” chapter, I was just like…you get me! I just wanted to cry.
CN: He’s a really calm, beautiful human – a very emotionally intelligent guy. And his partner is a therapist as well, so that helps!
GN: Definitely. Then, the last chapter was shot in Death Valley, in Nevada. It was very hot!
CN: Especially in a wet suit!
GN: I’m wearing this neoprene thing at midday in this place called “The Devil’s Golf Course,” for god’s sake! The ground was so hot that I was standing on tissues doing that shot with the car. The look on my face is not made up! “Get me out of here!” [laughter] But then the biggest part of me was like, “I care about this movie more than myself!”
BROODS’ video for “Heartbreak”:
QRO: [laughter] You were in Method acting mode, Georgia! You were just being Brando, come on! I’m glad you mentioned “Heartbreak” because it is a hypnotizing song, and what I find most stunning is the way it signals an idea that I think you’ve been wonderfully bold to call to the front carpet. That is the notion that people need to feel all of the emotions – perhaps especially the hardest ones – surrounding any event in order to grow from it. What do you think it is about our modern society that has led us to collectively believe that we can ever cherry-pick those experiences or successfully hide from hurt?
GN: I learned that lesson by not doing it for a really long time. Every time I’ve gone through anything that has really, really fucked me up, I have run away – real hard! I’ve moved cities, moved countries, kept myself so far away from what was going on with what was hurting me because I just could not handle it. This time, I was noticing that I was falling back into those patterns, and I just sort of slapped my own hand and was like, “No, you can’t run away this time.”
CN: This is a big one! You can’t shove it in a cupboard.
GN: This is a big one and you really have to deal with this like an adult this time. I was really lucky to have the most amazing support around me, the most amazing friendships with the woman in my life, and my family was a massive, massive part of helping me. I met a really nice person that helped me understand a lot of the things I was feeling. Then, music! Music has really helped me.
One of the things that made me feel sure about being so honest and personal on the record was listening to records that were doing that. Listening to albums where, especially women, were talking about their experiences. You get a chance to see how beautiful pain is. Also, a lot of books. I read The Alchemist for the first time and that was really helpful.
The amazing book that joined a lot of dots for me is a book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow. It’s about how we’ve gotten into bad habits when it comes to processing grief and how to get back to a place where we don’t run away from it and we actually build it into our daily lives and build rituals around it. It’s such a beautiful book and it taught me so much, like how to not be judgmental when those feelings come up – they move through you faster that way and they don’t get stuck. It’s this counterintuitive thing of letting yourself fall apart so you can get back up quicker, rather than resisting the wind. Sometimes you need to just fall down.
CN: And stay there for a bit!
QRO: Yes! And take a little nap! Sleep is always a great curative, I find. Having come out the other side of that hurt now, or being close to doing so, what would you say is the innate value of having your heart destroyed and do you feel, with regard to personal/spiritual growth, that destruction and birth go hand in hand?
GN: I’ve learned to see my low points as a lesson and not a personal failure. I do feel that when you feel low, it has a tendency to make you feel like you’ve done something wrong, which is not the case. You should be like, “This is just as valuable as joy. This is just as important as a good day.” Knowing that your body and spirit are asking for space to feel this and knowing to listen. Then, it goes away! [laughter]
QRO: Miracle of miracles! I think that’s utterly profound and such useful insight for anyone and everyone. Flowing from that, I must tell you, Caleb, that I greatly respect you for bringing something to the forefront of the musical conversation on the last record that I believe likewise desperately needs to be underscored: the ideas illustrated to perfection in “Too Proud“ about the way small-town rural life can mis-categorize masculinity as the classic “boys don’t cry” mentality. I saluted you in that song for actively questioning what was presented to you as manhood and wondered if you’ve come to any better definitions that you feel are shareable to help others?
CN: I think I’m constantly dealing with those things. It’s still a big problem in New Zealand. A lot of men just don’t even acknowledge their emotions here, a lot of my friends even. They just dodge them and run away. Observing that is heartbreaking as well. Men are meant to be this solid rock that can’t and shouldn’t move. I was just never brought up like that. I was in tears a lot growing up, and that was always encouraged by our Mom.
GN: She’s so sensitive and wears her heart on her sleeve all the time.
QRO: Love her! My kind of woman!
CN: I think I learned a lot of that from her and even Dad is still learning stuff from her. She’s really smart and her heart is so massive. Obviously, it’s always been dedicated to us as well.
GN: When you allow yourself to be affected by things, you end up connecting with people on a much deeper level and have a richer experience of life. That is the reward for feeling your feelings: greater connections and better relationships.
CN: Communication! Just talking about it is the only thing that can help. Even though my Mom encouraged it throughout my upbringing, society still told me not to, so I still had a lot of things to break down.
QRO: I can just imagine. My contention has always been that the real definition of masculinity is capability – what can you face fully? What can you do? What won’t you do? That is real strength.
CN: We were always encouraged, growing up, to have a very solid balance of masculine and feminine qualities. Most of my friends are girls! [laughter]
GN: Because he’s got three sisters! [laughter]
CN: Honestly, I relate better to women than men most of the time.
I was finally able to see what being a woman really meant to me, and that was being super powerful, in touch, and intuitive. Not being afraid of my own power, not being afraid of my own instincts.
QRO: I get that, Caleb, in every way. I’m your inversion for almost the same reason. In the American south, I am surrounded by women who think that there is nothing else to do but be this old-school, antebellum mother. “Look at my children, look at my Stepford life!” I’m over here with my chapped lips and my rainbow hair like, “Yeah, I’m not doing any of that!” [laughter]
GN: It’s important, I think! Women have been through so much shit that I don’t even really judge those people for choosing that life because…
CN: Their options are sometimes so small. You know, they haven’t been opened up, or given the chance to go and see stuff, or go to New Zealand and be a faery in the bush! [laughter]
GN: In New Zealand too, there are quite a lot of people who would like to stay in a sort of insulated life experience..
CN: Because it’s very safe here and the rest of the world is terrifying.
GN: Right, and when you have kids, not that I know, but all you’re really thinking about is them. There’s falling into this role of the martyr and that’s really expected of mothers, I think. I understand that that is important for the children, but it does make me feel gutted that a lot of women don’t feel like their needs are important and so they put it all on their kids.
CN: Our own Mom was just telling us the other day that it took her a long time to stop caring what other people thought.
QRO: It reminds me of Brené Brown and how she has spoken and written so eloquently about waking up one day and realizing, “Hey, wait a minute, I can’t actually be a good mother or example to my kids if there is nothing left of me.”
CN: Right, like why would I want to give my children what other people expect of me when I want to just give my children what they need from me.
GN: I think a lot of people, myself included, get stuck in this role where they think there’s all this honor in putting your own needs on the back burner to the point where you’re so depleted that you end up losing yourself and becoming a difficult person to be around. The relationship you have with yourself, if you think about it, is like two people. If those two people are fighting, they’re fucking hard to be around. But when those two people are communicating and you can give yourself all that you would expect from a healthy, loving relationship, then you have the capacity for so, so much.
CN: I need to be alone a lot so I can have the capacity to be around people.
BROODS’ video for “Like a Woman”:
QRO: Oh, me too! That’s an artist’s nature for sure and more than half the reason I write and stay where I do. You touched on something there too that I think fuses perfectly with “Like a Woman.” This is a Tina Turner-level instant feminist manifesto in song, Georgia. How would you define womanhood at its zenith and what, in your opinion, are the major remaining forces constricting the arrival of more women to such places?
GN: I think femininity is powerful and that is where that song came from – feeling powerful again.
CN: And there are so many shit men in the world that are so scared of her.
QRO: Same! I hurt men’s feelings on the daily simply by being, by breathing!
GN: Yeah! There are some men who can see that a powerful woman works in their favor, and they have all this space to care and advocate for them, and validate them. All these things that they really want, they can only get when they are empowering the women around them. I was in this dynamic in my previous relationship where I came in very broken and young. I kind of played the orphan a lot and then got into this bad habit of feeling like a child in my own relationship. Coming out of it, I felt like I just exploded into a new version and shed my skin and felt so much more capable.
CN: Like a cicada coming out of the ground after seven years.
GN: Totally. And then I was finally able to see what being a woman really meant to me, and that was being super powerful, in touch, and intuitive. Not being afraid of my own power, not being afraid of my own instincts. That’s a big one, instincts! Obviously, all people have these built-into-your-body instincts. Over time, the way that our society has evolved to suppress women, a lot of them turn away from those. Me included.
When I finally faced myself, I was way more happy with who I was. I honestly felt like I had died and entered into a new life where everything that I was giving and putting out into the world, I was getting back. It gave me this new relationship with humankind, the Earth, and the universe. It sounds really cheesy, but I felt like I was in a two-way relationship with everything that I was experiencing and I was getting and giving in a much more fluid way.
CN: You can trust the world so easily then. Before that, you can’t.
QRO: Absolutely no question. I think any woman, and certainly myself, can connect to what you’re saying about being in that first kind of relationship where either the other person or your own choices make you small. Think about what it would mean for a man to want a woman to be small in the first place. As in, what would have to be wrong with him in order for you to need to be diminished. That’s the crux right there, isn’t it? Because a real man would look at an empowered woman and go, “Yes. That, please.” So, there’s a disconnect right there that I think that song is brilliantly addressing, from both sides of the gender angle.
CN: Yeah, some men are like, “that is hot.” And then some are like, “I’m intimidated as fuck.”
When I finally faced myself, I was way more happy with who I was. I honestly felt like I had died and entered into a new life where everything that I was giving and putting out into the world, I was getting back.
QRO: Oh my god, all day. Caleb, please write the novel of my life because, seriously, I am tired of writing it! [laughter]
CN: I just think, when I hear those people, “Oh, you’ve got some insecurities in there that you need to work on.”
GN: The more I grow and learn in general, the more I realize that the way people express themselves, talk about others, or talk about the world is just a reflection of how they’re feeling about themselves. To see that when someone is feeling like they need to gain control or they need to feel big, there’s probably a part of them that is struggling to feel expressed.
CN: They feel small.
GN: They probably feel like they can’t stop judging themselves or there are parts of their own self-love that are falling through the cracks. Thinking about it that way has really helped me see it as being not something that came about because I did anything wrong, or came about because there wasn’t love in the relationship. Because there really, really was. You learn these things the hard way so that you can carry on with your life stronger.
CN: The love was built on shaky foundations.
QRO: I know that scene all too well, and it gets into the kinds of themes I think you are expertly exploring in a song like “Gaslight,” which contains a powerful resonance for me personally. That song does such a sparkling job of taking one of the more insidious aspects of emotional abuse and shrouding it in the kinds of sounds we are all hearing in our heads as it is happening to us. Later, upon reflection, it sounds like the dragon of death it really is, but I wondered if you have developed any insights through the hardships that have driven some of these songs into how to hear that fire-breathing element a bit earlier – essentially, how to conduct better self-care in relationships as they’re happening rather than in retrospect?
GN: I’ve thought a lot about that, and I think a lot of the time you don’t even know that you’re doing that to somebody. You love how you’ve been taught to love, that’s for sure. You can really do that to somebody and lead them to their own devices for perpetuating that cycle in their own head. The more I listen to that song, the more I hear myself singing it to myself! Which is buzzy because I think we gaslight ourselves too! We talk ourselves into thinking that we’re crazy. We don’t listen to our bodies, or our own thoughts and emotions. We just build ourselves up in our own heads to be these crazy people and that is really damaging.
QRO: Most definitely: if you can’t advocate for yourself, no one can do it for you. Julia Stone talked about that – a woman I outright adore and another of your Southern Hemisphere wonders! She said, when she first split off to do her own solo work, she was super shocked at who people thought she should be, both as an artist and as a woman. So, these topics in your songs are medicines, and they are medicines people need. The best bit is: they won’t know they’re taking medicine because the song itself is ear-candy!
BROODS’ video for “Piece of My Mind”:
“Piece Of My Mind” does that interesting lyrical thing wherein the traditional phrase of “give you a piece of my mind” gets turned inside out and you are singing about wanting to get a piece of your own mind, needing the space and time to hear your own thoughts. Fantastically insightful wordplay there. How do you guys achieve that needed space in your writing process as a pair and as individuals? How do you go about getting the ‘pieces of your own mind’ that you require?
CN: We are very well-rehearsed at knowing when we need each other and when we need to have the other piss right off… [laughter]
GN: It’s also that, as much as music is important to us, as is this joint venture that we’ve been on for the last eight or nine years, we are more important to one another. Having the ability to see when the other person is dying to express themselves and just being like, “Take the floor.” And trusting that when you need that, you’ll get the floor too.
QRO: Would that the world was full of people who knew when to relinquish the floor like you two as we’d all be in happier head-zones! [laughter] I do want to say that spending this luscious floor time with the two of you has majorly improved my head zone today! Thank you for being so unreserved and hilarious in your willingness to walk me through Space Island!
GN: This has been such a great convo; I’ve loved it!
QRO: When you come to Atlanta in May, I’ll be the bright, sparkly thing down front. That is both a threat and a promise. [laughter]
CN: Let’s talk some more in real life then!
QRO: I can’t wait. Now, go to the beach in New Zealand because you can!
CN: Easy-peasy! Thanks for this; it was a great chat and we’ll see you in May.
BROODS will be bringing their kaleidoscopic Kiwi-ness stateside for a spate of Space Island shows beginning in late May 2022. Get out to see them or else endangered Tuataras and enigmatic Potoroos will senselessly and spontaneously perish.
