Georgia Nott is very pointedly not talking about sex.
She’s trying to explain the inspiration behind ‘All Of Your Glory’ – the strikingly tender ballad that sits at the centre of Broods’ new album Conscious – without sounding crude.
“I wrote ‘All Of Your Glory’ not about my own experience … but about a universal feeling,” she says hesitantly. “It’s about when you’re going through a rough patch with somebody and you don’t really need words anymore – you need to have the physical expression of love again. It’s about how you want to know them better than anyone else again. You want to have that one-on-one special connection between you two.”
She laughs, and gives up avoiding the S-word. “I like to call it a really sad make-up sex song. I don’t want to make it sound really dirty or anything, but I guess at the end of the day when you’re in a really serious relationship, that physical side of it is really important. Life can get [you] down a bit, and you … forget to give yourself completely to the other person.”
The phone line crackles. Nott is in LA, having recently relocated to the States along with her brother Caleb, who is also Broods’ other half. “We just moved a couple of months ago,” Nott says in her thick Kiwi accent. “[It’s] very different. In a good way, though. It’s really fun. When you need to do promo stuff, you don’t need to fly across the world to do it. We can actually go to a meeting on a whim.”
One can imagine that the two Notts will find themselves in a lot of meetings over the next few months. From both a commercial and a critical standpoint, Conscious is exactly the kind of album the pair needed to make to launch themselves to the next level. It’s a den of pop hooks and crunching choruses, but it’s not so mainstream that it’ll alienate their fans. It’s the crossover record to end all crossover records; a Like A Virgin for the modern age.
“It was so fun to write,” Nott says. “I think the second album is scary, but that fear drives you to experiment. It was really cool to have time to figure out what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to release Evergreen volume two. We wanted to create something that was relevant to our lives now. I’m just really stoked for everyone to hear it. It’s better than listening to the same songs from two years ago.”
For Nott, the key to the album’s success was the duo’s growing confidence. “It was a really cool album to work on because Caleb was more sure about what he wanted to work on in terms of the production, and I was more experimental with the stories that I’m singing about,” she explains. “We did have a little bit more of a clue what we were doing. So we pushed ourselves as far as we could. It was a fun, experimental album that turned out to be really accurate when it comes to us and really truthful to who we are as musicians. It was just a happy accident.”
Over the course of our interview, Nott rarely speaks in the singular. She’s all ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, and it’s clear the two halves of Broods aren’t just brother and sister – they’re genuinely effective collaborators. “We’re human beings and sometimes we’re in different moods to each other and we kind of just go off on our own tangents,” she says. “But sometimes we’ll go from scratch and build up a song together.
“The really, really sad songs are usually the ones I haven’t had Caleb supervising me for, just because when I write by myself I tend to be a bit sadder,” laughs Nott. “But that’s cool. I think it’s important to have that downbeat song. The ‘All Of Your Glory’ tracks are as important to me as the big songs.”
Make no mistake, Conscious does contain some very big songs – not least of all ‘Free’, a clattering pop hit with a surprisingly dark chorus. “If I lose it all, at least I’ll be free,” Nott sings, her voice airy yet determined. Fittingly, ‘Free’ also boasts Broods’ most disturbing music video yet – a dystopian vignette that features a writhing Nott being fed horrors via a virtual reality headset.
“It was probably my favourite video to work on, probably because it was the most challenging one to do so far,” she says. “It was just cool to go out of our comfort zone and really make our vision … come to life ourselves. I had to put myself in some really weird, uncomfortable situations. [But] there was a relaxed vibe [on set], even though the video doesn’t really have a relaxed vibe.”
Though it would be a stretch to say Broods are a political band, there is a certain level of cultural commentary to their music, one particularly evident in the ‘Free’ video.
“We were trying to play on the fact that people get so stuck in this online world that they can create this place that feels so real; that it can kind of be scary how it becomes more important than face-to-face conversations and physical, real-life relationships. [They] kind of take a back seat to online relationships. It’s scary how the opposite of real can feel so real.
“The setting for the video goes with the sound of the song,” Nott continues. “The song is very industrial and the song is very electronic, so to have it set in this creepy-as warehouse, it’s really perfect. I never really thought about that too much, but now I think about that, it’s even more perfect than I first realised.”
Nott laughs warmly. She does that a lot, actually, though never as much as when she’s talking about the experience of performing live. Evidently, getting up onstage sits at the very core of why she does what she does, even if that wasn’t exactly the case when she was first starting out.
“When I was a kid … I used to hate [performing],” she says. “I just got extremely nervous and I just couldn’t handle it. I’d walk offstage immediately after I finished my last line. I’d be out of there. But after a while it becomes addictive, especially when we’re doing headline shows in front of all of our fans.”
That isn’t to say that Nott doesn’t still get nervous. “I still am sometimes,” she says with a giggle. “But it’s not to the point where I don’t want to do this. Particularly on the first show of a tour, I always psyche myself out a bit too much. But I think it’s good to be a bit nervous. It shows that you’re still worried about impressing people. The day I stop getting nervous I’ll worry, because I’ll feel like I don’t care enough.”
Certainly, if there’s one thing Nott has in abundance, it’s care. “There’s something very special about being able to see the people you are connecting with, rather than just putting the music out into the world and fans telling you over social media that they like it.” Her voice softens. “It’s a real therapeutic thing for us. When we don’t do it, we get withdrawals.”
Conscious by Broods is out Friday June 24 through Capitol/Universal; and Broods, along withVera Blue and Xavier Dunn, appear at Enmore Theatre, Saturday July 9.
