Presets find spark for power revival

Kim Moyes and Julian Hamilton are taking the Presets on the road.

Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes, right, juggled fatherhood and took their time to write material for their fourth album. ‘A lot of bands don’t get to make four records,’ says Hamilton. Picture: John Feder

On the last night of autumn in Sydney’s inner city, two men are performing high-energy electronic music to a responsive crowd packed into a small room inside the Metro Theatre. Kim Moyes sits at a drum kit, wearing a bright red wig and white jumpsuit, while Julian Hamilton prods at several synthesisers and regularly removes the microphone from its stand to dance beneath a video screen that projects a series of colourful artworks.

This is an intimate, exclusive show limited to hardcore fans and music industry professionals, so it’s an odd mix of impassioned young people pressed together up front and a few more weathered faces towards the back. A camera on a long arm regularly sweeps above the audience, as the performance is being filmed and streamed live to tens of thousands of devices across the country, thanks to a partnership with a telecommunications company.

Sandwiched between familiar hits such as My People, This Boy’s in Love and Talk Like That are recent singles Do What You Want and Downtown Shutdown, as well as several more unreleased tracks from an imminent fourth album.

The blend of old and new works well, and both volume and spirits remain high throughout their hour-long performance.

After stepping off stage, the two old friends look at each other and smile with relief. Happily, one of Australia’s most popular and respected electronic music acts has played a successful warm-up show before it heads out on its most extensive national tour in years.

A few hours later, just after midnight, Hamilton’s sleep is broken. He checks his phone to see that the fourth Presets album, Hi Viz, is now available on Spotify. By daybreak, it will be sitting atop the iTunes albums chart.

Later that morning, at the Woolloomooloo office of their record label, the pair witness a startling depiction of the transient nature of pop music. A huge banner at street level advertising Keith Urban’s newest album — April’s Graffiti U — is unceremoniously ripped from the glass by a couple of young workers. Within the hour, Urban is replaced by Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes, who is about to score his first No 1 on the Australian Recording Industry Association chart.

Where younger artists may be intimidated by seeing something so brutal on their album release day, these two regard it with little more than a shrug and a smirk.

Having not released music since 2012’s Pacifica, they agree that the present era is a strangely dislocated one in which to release new art. Streaming music was in its infancy six years ago; now, it’s among the most popular methods of music consumption. They note, however, that one side effect of the ubiquity of streaming means that an album release feels decidedly less celebratory.

Upstairs, Moyes and Hamilton sit in an empty EMI Music boardroom. From this position overlooking Sydney Harbour, they point out career landmarks: not just the nearby nightclubs that hosted some of their first shows around 2003 but loftier locales such as the Sydney Opera House and the Domain, where they played at the Homebake and Field Day festivals, as well as the Sydney Conservatorium where they met in 1995.

“Our musical history — we’re looking at it,” says Hamilton, momentarily overawed by the view and that revelation.

The Presets at the 2009 Good Vibrations festival at Centennial Park.

Plenty of musical acts have lived and died during the six years between Presets albums.

Having ascended to the top of Australian popular music in the years that followed their rowdy second album, 2008’s Apocalypso — which sold more than 210,000 copies domestically and garnered a suite of awards, including ARIA album of the year — then experienced a rather less enthusiastic response to the subtler tones of Pacifica, the duo is nothing if not grounded.

“A lot of bands don’t get to make four records,” Hamilton notes. “We’re very fortunate to still maintain a career for this long.”

At 41, both men are grateful for their long lives as professional musicians. As well as both becoming fathers in 2010, they took their time to write material in a variety of styles and moods.

With the dozen tracks that comprise their fourth album, energy was the intent. “The biggest thing with Hi Viz was to try and get grooves that would make you want to move without having to think — which isn’t always easy to do,” says Moyes.

His accomplice puts it another way: “We really wanted Hi Viz to sound like going to a mate’s house party,” says Hamilton.

Accordingly, they decided to excise all of the more melancholic, introspective tracks in favour of tempos more at home in nightclubs. As they witnessed at the previous night’s show, this approach is a crowd-pleaser: despite not having heard new tracks such as Martini or Tools Down, there was no sense of hesitation on the dancefloor, only movement.

The latter song features the antiquated sound of a steam whistle. It prompted an immediate ripple of pleasure in the crowd, even if the closest many of those in attendance might have come to the real thing is depicted in the opening credits of The Simpsons.

“It’s like the ‘rave horn’ of 2018,” says Moyes with a grin. “Who doesn’t like to knock off, then knock one down?”

The steam whistle in Tools Down is an example of the lightheartedness that runs through much of the album. “There’s a groove layer, a comedy layer, then there’s melodies and lyrics,” Moyes says of their songwriting. “Overall, the whole experience is like a little cartoon.”

Through the years, Moyes and Hamilton have had a unique vantage point from which to watch hundreds of thousands of young Australians losing themselves in their music in a hedonistic blur. The duo has long since proved that the combination of live drums, memorable vocal hooks and cutting, pulsing electronic sounds can be tantalising.

Of their live shows, Moyes begins: “We definitely incite some kind of base level — I want to say ‘enthusiasm’, but it’s not the right word.”

Hamilton makes a suggestion while resting his under-slept head on his folded arms: “Mentalism?”

“Yeah, I think we crack open some primal urge in people,” continues Moyes, nodding. “A typical Presets crowd, at a good show, is really loose. It’s something that I haven’t seen a lot of in recent years, checking out different acts: electronic music, in general, has been pretty downbeat and mellow. There are only a few acts I see where people go a bit more animal; a bit more apeshit.”

Having helped to popularise live electronic music in this country alongside acts such as Cut Copy and Midnight Juggernauts, it seems as though the break between albums may have been perfectly timed.

Perhaps after a few years of downbeat, mellow artists dominating the charts and clubs, young Australians are searching for the kind of pure euphoria that only a steam whistle on a crowded dancefloor can provoke.

The Presets will tour Hi Viz from next week, starting in Perth on June 13 and ending at the Gold Coast on June 29.