A Quick Chat with The Only Objects

An Excess of Hauntings explores lost futures, memory and things that refuse to disappear. What sparked the album?
Really, it comes down to one simple, overriding idea: where is the future that we were promised?
I feel like when we were growing up, we were promised this bright, wide-open future, and moving through this album has been a case of grieving for whatever happened to that future. I’m often quite an instinctual writer, and I only realised that this theme was coming to the fore partway through the process. Of course, once I did realise that, I went on a gigantic, hyperfixated deep dive into all things hauntology and lost futures.
It’s really given us as a band a pathway forward as well, a direction beyond what we explored on our debut that is both personal and conceptual. I enjoy that contradiction.

How did The Magnetbahn come together, and what does it bring to the album?
Ironically enough, Part II was written first. For me, it was almost a thesis statement: using the history of a single magnetic levitation train in Berlin as a metaphor for abandoned futures.

We had always thought of framing The Magnetbahn as a multi-part song, so we wrote and recorded a little sketch that became Part I and sent it over to Düsseldorf for our good friend Rob, aka WATT!, and Wolfgang Flür to work on.

I think the two work brilliantly as a suite, and the recording of a sweeping train that joins the pieces is one of my favourite moments on the album. Together, they form the centrepiece of the whole concept.

What was it like working with Wolfgang Flür?
Pretty surreal!

I met Wolfgang through an unusual series of circumstances. I used to run a fortnightly electronic music showcase in Adelaide, and I was always looking for new artists. One day, I found someone making Kosmische music who was listed as being in Adelaide under the name WATT! I got in touch, and the artist in question, Rob, told me he would love to play, but he was actually living in Düsseldorf.

We stayed in touch, and when he came back for a visit we booked him for a gig. We kept chatting, and it turned out he was very connected in the Düsseldorf music scene.

Fast forward to 2019 and I was in western Germany on holiday, and Rob invited me to catch up. In passing, he mentioned that “Wolfgang might come along”. This was obviously A Big Deal. So I ended up out on a Sunday night in a venue repurposed from an abattoir, watching a Thai surf-rock band with Rob and Wolfgang Flür, who is a really genuine, humble guy.

I always knew I was going to ask the two of them to work on the album, but I never really expected it to happen! Rob was enthusiastic when I raised the possibility, so I sent over a bunch of music and, some months later, back comes this track with Wolfgang’s voice on it.

My inner teenager who was obsessed with Kraftwerk was pretty happy at that moment.

Access Will Be Retained has a very different energy. What were you exploring with that track?

After our first album, the band went through a series of lineup changes, and we eventually settled into our current power-trio format.

Access was written and arranged just as we shifted into that format, and it’s become a bit of a statement of intent for how we want the band to sound now. Our previous work was a bit more rooted in a pop tradition and, while we’ve remained accessible in our approach, we really wanted to develop the sound in a more experimental direction.

There’s a reason it’s the first song proper on the album: it’s telegraphing who we are as a band. By the time Jack’s three atonal saxophones crop up, you’ll know whether we’re for you or not.

The album moves through rock, post-punk, prog, trip hop and electronics. How do you bring all those sounds together?
Honestly, I don’t know how to stay in one genre. I’ve tried a few times to limit myself and write things that are more straightforward, but I just… get a bit bored?

I’m also incredibly lucky to work with Zacc on bass and Sam on drums, who both come from a funk tradition, so they really provide the groove and backbeat that allows the songs to coexist while having entirely different sonic approaches. I’ve started referring to our music as “post-genre”, which I think is the most accurate way of looking at it.

Something I think we’ve done really well on this album is the creation of a “sound world”: not just the tonal and aesthetic choices we make, but the moments of sound design throughout that pull the songs together. All of the broken radio noises, samples and foley act like connective tissue.

We’ve been very lucky to work with Tim Whitt as our producer, who has a wonderfully unusual brain in this regard.

You recently launched the album in Adelaide. How did the night feel from your perspective?
The launch was the sixth show in a curated series we’ve been running called Echoes in the Gloaming. They’re nights where mood is more important than genre, and theatricality is very much encouraged.

We’ve been working with the venue, Low Life Basement Bar, on these for some time now, and it’s great to really create a sense of atmosphere through that curation. I’ve always believed that you need to give prospective audiences more than “three bands play in a pub”.

The launch itself was a great night. Not only did we have a wonderful crowd, but we were lucky enough to have several of the guest artists on the album appear live with us.

After two and a half years of work on the album, it felt very validating to finally have it out in the world and received so warmly.