Hilltop Hoods: what the seasons changed
Hilltop Hoods’ blending of far sounds and near stories still resonates.
It was not a new music that the three young men from Adelaide popularised in Australia, but instead a local twist on an art form that emerged on the streets of urban America. They brought a love of beats, samples and wordplay that had never before been heard and embraced by a wide audience. In turn, they changed the direction of music in this country, like boulders dropped in a flowing waterway. Once their music began to find a national audience in 2004, nothing would ever be the same again.
Before that, though, came the grind. The debut Hilltop Hoods album, A Matter of Time, was released in 1999, the same year the quartet became a trio following the departure of DJ Next. A preference for slower tempos emphasised the quick-tongued rhymes of the two vocalists. Rather than adopting American accents, as some of their forebears had done, their voices were unmistakably Australian.
MC Pressure (aka Dan Smith) possessed a deeper voice, while Suffa (Matt Lambert) offered a more trebley tone. Behind both rappers stood DJ Debris (Baz Francis), whose role was to help shape their sound in the studio and man the turntables on stage.
They were young men telling our stories back to us, using language cloaked not in references to the five boroughs of New York City but instead much closer to home, to our experience: prime minster John Howard would earn a mention in their lyrics, as would an interpolated chorus from a popular song by Powderfinger and the habit of watching Friday night footy while wearing a hoodie. It was this blending of far sounds and near stories that resonated then, and still does today.
The three friends soldiered on with 2001’s Left Foot, Right Foot, which was produced and arranged with abundant skill, consisting of 18 tracks that touched on a range of moods and styles. Beefy basslines were regularly boosted high in the mix, while a spacious range of instruments and samples added tonal colour and diversity.
Fifth track What The Seasons Change had MC Pressure telling the story of a troubled young man, offset by sparse piano notes and a skittish beat. Its four long verses were vividly coloured by the protagonist’s descent into drug addiction, burglary, homelessness and violent assault, followed by jail time, release, relapse and a distant hope for redemption. In its closing lines, Pressure rapped: “No matter your status, fact is we all been humbled / No matter the foundation, all solid things can crumble / No matter the strength or length something’s sustained / It never stays the same — that’s simply what the seasons change.”
Its gritty year-in-the-life narrative — based on a true story — was a dark outlier, especially when compared with sunny tracks such as Leaving Sideways, which celebrated the simple pleasure of jumping in a car and heading to the beach on a Friday with mates in tow, the anticipation of shared fun all but tangible. Yet the depth, insight and maturity of that four-minute track hinted at what these artists might be able to achieve if allowed a little more time and space to perfect their collective craft.
Suffa took 20 copies of the album to England, where he hand-sold them on consignment to record stores while working as a postman in Brixton. Yet like its predecessor, Left Foot, Right Foot was ignored by all but the tiny community of hip-hop heads scattered around the country.
Between attending small concerts in capital cities and meeting at places such as Melbourne’s Obese Records — which was one of very few record stores and labels devoted to selling and marketing hip-hop releases by Australian artists — fans were beginning to connect with one another through online message boards, where they traded beats, production tips and endless big-noting banter.
Unseen to all but the keenest eyes, the tide of popular music was slowly drawing back. Far out at sea, a wall of water was building that would soon crash against the land and send local hip-hop into homes, cars and concert halls across the country — but not just yet.
On returning to Adelaide after his British sojourn, Suffa took up a factory job that involved pouring concrete to make outdoor furniture, while Pressure worked as a warehouse manager and Debris had just begun running a courier business. Together and alone, between work commitments, they sank long hours into improving their songwriting beyond what was becoming an established and distinctive sound.
With Pressure more interested in writing and performing rhymes than production, Suffa and Debris were always the pair devoted to the art of crate digging. It involved scouring record stores in search of fresh “breaks” — often instrumental parts or vocal melodies that could be recorded from vinyl LPs, sampled and reappropriated in a new context. Hip-hop music is built on this time-intensive skill, and it was on a Sunday afternoon dig that Suffa chanced upon a record that would help change the course of music history. It cost him 50c.
Released in 1971, American folk singer Melanie’s Garden in the City album contained a closing track named The People in the Front Row. On Suffa’s simple home studio set-up — otherwise known as his parents’ computer and ghetto blaster — he isolated Melanie Safka’s chorus vocal, and also captured the melodic flourishes and gentle bassline that ran through the song. When sped up and paired with a cymbal-heavy beat and turntable scratches, it started to feel like something new and special.
It is difficult to overstate the effect that a single song had on a culture that had previously shrugged its shoulders at the idea of Australian voices in hip-hop. Through the lyrics of the song, named The Nosebleed Section, Suffa and Pressure celebrated their love for the art form, and for the fans pressed up against the stage who shared that passion for rhyming words and beats. What started as a small crowd would, in time, become enormous — yet the three friends had absolutely no reason to expect that a fresh wave was about to crash, as their previous toil had resulted in few external rewards. “It’s called hip-hop, guess what? / We’re the industry joke,” Suffa rapped in Tomorrow Will Do.
The intrinsic pleasures were abundant, however. The title of the 2003 album containing that song was a reflection of how Hilltop Hoods weighed the value of this music in their lives. Not an interest, not a hobby, nor even a passion — instead, for the trio, hip-hop was The Calling.
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Although it was never released as a single, within a year of the album’s release, The Nosebleed Section had surged from the margins to the mainstream. Its popularity — and, to a lesser extent, that of the album’s lead single, Dumb Enough — led to The Calling becoming the first hip-hop release by an Australian act to reach gold certification, indicating CD sales in excess of 35,000 copies. In July 2006, it became the first to hit platinum sales of 70,000 copies.
The Safka-sampling song was voted No 9 in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2003; six years later, it ranked at No 17 in the national radio station’s Hottest 100 of All Time poll, where it was the highest-voted Australian track. In effect, it became not just the signature song for the Adelaide trio, but that of an entire emerging genre. It was the key that unlocked the door to a room that would soon be filled with dozens of artists who could now see a viable career path.
With national interest came the chance for the Hoods to quit their jobs. For Debris, whose parcel delivery business was going well, the leap was an even tougher decision — yet as independent artists signed to Obese Records and distributed nationally, the notion of devoting both days and nights to music was too attractive to resist.
The biggest stages in Australian music were now theirs. At national festivals, their name crept up the bill from small fonts to the top of posters. Their own headline shows demanded bigger venues with each successive tour, from clubs to theatres to arenas. As their audience has grown, so too has the group, both as lyricists and men. The 2006 album The Hard Road contained a single that celebrated various alcohol brands (What a Great Night), but by 2012, Suffa wrote an entire song about recognising his need to quit drinking for two years (Shredding the Balloon).
They have challenged fans by pairing with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra for two “restrung” live albums, in a fascinating marriage of high culture and what was once perceived to be its precise opposite. Remarkably, five of the group’s albums have debuted at No 1 on the ARIA charts — a feat only matched or bettered by the likes of Silverchair, Powderfinger, John Farnham and Jimmy Barnes. Widespread international success has proved elusive, however, although the trio have been playing festival and club shows in Europe, North America and Britain for more than a decade.
Their seventh studio album, 2014’s Walking Under Stars, contained two particularly personal songs. The first was a love song that celebrated their partners (Won’t Let You Down), while the second was Pressure’s solo track Through the Dark, which chronicled his eight-year-old son’s journey through leukaemia treatment. “I wrote this while you slept in a hospital bed / Know this, your breath at the cost of my breath,” he rapped. “I’d forgo this life, let you honour my death / If you could know what it’s like to live long and regret.”
Through the Dark marked a serious evolution in Australian hip-hop, for here was one of the kings of the genre putting his most intimate, vulnerable moments on record. It was a long, long way from the simple joys of The Nosebleed Section, whose final verse described “a dinner date followed by a funk show / We’ll rip off our tops and jump around in the front row”.
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A fortnight before the release of their eighth studio album, The Great Expanse, Review meets the trio in the South Australian capital. All three are married, and Suffa has joined his fellow MC in fatherhood; he has two young daughters, while Pressure has three children with his wife. His son from an earlier relationship, Liam — he of the childhood cancer scare — is now 14, and now loves Through the Dark, a song he once hated.
Over a pub lunch, the three artists are happy to delve into their past two decades — including 15 years at the very top of the tree — though with no small amount of cringing at the mention of their first two albums, which have long been out of print and are thus all but excised from the public record. On streaming music services, for instance, their discography appears to begin with The Calling.
The overwhelming emotion on this February afternoon is a mix of relief and elation, though, for the habitual perfectionists only recently finished the final tweaks during the album’s mastering process. In fact, they were still checking mixes while touring as one of the headliners at Falls Festival at the end of the year; in Marion Bay, Tasmania, they were trusted with the weighty task of playing as the clock struck midnight to begin 2019. With their deep swag of proven crowd-pleasers — and with Debris’s decks flanked by live drums and horns — there are arguably few performers better qualified or more in demand.
Afterwards, we return to Suffa’s home in the Adelaide Hills. Given hip-hop’s historical underground status, it is fitting that the three friends have never seen the point in leaving their hometown for a bigger city.
His lush home studio overlooks a small backyard pool shaded by tall trees. He hired the same acoustic engineer and studio designer as Debris, so as to simplify their workflow and remove the possibility for different-sounding rooms affecting the way they hear recordings. In a sign of changing times, the pair’s passion for crate digging in record stores has been usurped by YouTube deep-dives and so-called “tabbit holes”, where Debris indulges his obsessive nature via hundreds of open browser tabs cross-referenced against audio recordings database Discogs.
It has not escaped the attention of long-time fans that the trio’s sound has subtly changed over the years. Where once their cameras were trained on a small community of passionate and knowledgeable hip-hop fans, now the aperture is much wider, necessitating a slight change in songwriting style. This is the nature of artistic evolution; while early adopters may wish the group would return to the style of The Calling or The Hard Road, the trio are decidedly uninterested in looking backwards.
A more pop-oriented approach has resulted in chorus hooks performed by singers such as Sia, Montaigne and Dan Sultan — as well as the likes of Adrian Eagle, Ruel and Nyassa on the new album. In turn, their songs have comfortably crossed the airwaves from Triple J to commercial radio, meaning that most adults younger than 40 have at least a passing awareness of their music.
Displayed on the computer monitor that faces the vocal booth in Suffa’s studio is a larger version of the artwork that adorns the cover of The Great Expanse. The two MCs split a six-pack as the celebratory mood continues, while one of Suffa’s daughters asks to watch the cartoon Bluey on iView, followed by the 90-second earworm song Baby Shark played at full volume. With the grin of a proud father who has his priorities straight, Suffa is happy to indulge such requests, but only after Review insists on hearing a couple of tracks from the new album through his high-quality speaker set-up.
As the opening bars of Into the Abyss fill the room with the warm dynamics of hip-hop masters at work, the three musicians listen and nod their heads in unison. It sounds like something new and special.
The Great Expanse is released on Friday via HTH/Universal Music. Hilltop Hoods will support Eminem in Brisbane on Wednesday, followed by Sydney on Friday, Melbourne (Feb 24) and Perth (Feb 27).
Andrew McMillen travelled to Adelaide as a guest of Universal Music.