Features

With the buzzing energy of Jera On Air festival surrounding us, I was lucky enough to catch up with Press Club’s Natalie Foster and Greg Rietwyk. Prior to their riveting set, the duo sat down with me to talk about their latest album, To All The Ones That I Love. Still raw, urgent, and fiercely honest, the record captures everything fans have come to love about Press Club while at the same time pushing their sound to new heights.

PRT: You just released your fourth album in just seven years. Are you constantly working on new songs?

Natalie: Yeah, pretty consistently. When we're not touring, we're generally writing and getting things happening. We've had a couple of years of pretty intense touring, so this album took a little longer than we had hoped for, but we're pretty excited about it.

PRT: Is there always a certain moment where you're like, we need to sit down for a new album?

Greg: I think we go like “it’s writing time now.” I actually started writing for the next one before I left.

Natalie: Yeah, we've all started writing for the next one before we left. I've got notes in my phone ready for lyric ideas, and Greg has a bunch of guitar and musical ideas, so we already have a bit of a vibe of what we want the next album to sound like.  

PRT: You were friends before you started the band, but they always say you shouldn’t work with friends or family.

Greg: I feel like that doesn’t apply for bands. You need to be friends with the people first, and that's actually more important than the band. Because there needs to be open communication, otherwise it won't work. If it's just a business, then it will fall apart.

Natalie: Absolutely. It's always people first. The band is very high on our priorities list, but at the same time we always have to take into consideration each person's unique situation and how we go about things.

Greg: Yeah, otherwise mental health suffers. And then at the end of the day, someone will burn out and then they might never want to play music again because it's just ruined for them.

Natalie: We want to be here for a long time. If it means stepping back a little bit or just taking our time for the next album or not saying yes to a tour, it's all fine.

PRT: Has working together changed your friendship?

Greg: Absolutely. It's made us probably closer than ever because I spend more time with Natalie, Frank and Ian than my parents or my wife sometimes. I’m away with them for four weeks and you're together almost 24 hours a day. So yeah, you can't help but strengthen those relationships. Of course, it tests those relationships too. There's times where really it's quite hard, but you need to just keep a dialogue happening and be able to speak to each other openly.  

Natalie: Yeah. We are all about communication in our band.

PRT: Which can be the most difficult part.

Natalie: Absolutely. All it takes is one person to not be open about how they're feeling, or to not admit that they've been a bit of an asshole. We're all assholes sometimes, don't get me wrong. But at the end of the day, we are a family and that's never going to change. We are four people who have found ourselves in this incredibly unique situation where we do spend so much time in each other's pockets. We know each other in and out. It's like, yes, we push each other's buttons sometimes, but also it's always okay because we always just bring it up the next day.

PRT: The new album is dedicated to your fans, your friends and family, and the band itself. Is it hard to juggle when one thing you love - being in the band and going on tour - takes you away from the other part that you love?

Natalie: That's a good question. It's definitely a struggle, but I think you've got to find the right balance. And for us, we listen to each other and listen to what's right for us as people, not just what's right for us as a band. But yeah, we go overseas and we play to thousands of people, and we can't tour without those people, but we also can't tour without people that we go home to. And they keep us grounded and humble, and they support us in this chaotic life that we've chosen.

PRT: I read that you already had the title track for the new album when you were making the first album. 

Greg: Yeah. Well, we didn't have the name or the lyrics yet, but we had the music for a song that was never released on our first album, ‘Late Teens’ because it didn’t feel right. But we revisited that session and we felt there was something there. It almost sounded like something that we would write now. So it was cool to come back to that and go, well, anything's on the table. We've got a hundred other songs we've never released, so maybe one day they'll all come back. You shouldn't push them aside.

Natalie: That song in particular, we all liked it. There was something there and we went through two complete iterations back when we were recording ‘Late Teens.’ We rewrote all of the lyrics, we rewrote the chorus. We just kept on pushing, but we couldn’t get it right at that time. So it's exciting that we've been able to come back to it.  

Greg: It actually took a friend to say, ‘You should release that as a single.’ 

Natalie: And we were all like, oh, I dunno. It felt old in a way, but then it ended up becoming the title track (laughs). 

PRT: You just mentioned you have around a hundred songs or parts of songs like that. Are they all floating around waiting to find a home? 

Greg: I wouldn't write them off. You come back to them with a different perspective, and almost experience them as a different person. You might hear something new in there and ‘that thing that I thought didn't work, I can now find a way to make it work.’ And that's exciting. That's why you should never stop creating. 

PRT: The album deals with themes like growth, evolving and self-awareness. Have there been moments when you were writing where you went like, ‘Oh, wait?’ 

Natalie: Yeah. When we were in the studio, I went through a bit of a transition because I was moving house at the time and my life felt quite chaotic at that time. I was just stripping it all back and getting a new perspective, a new direction that I wanted on a personal level. It was nice to capture that feeling at the time. There's a lot of positive things to look forward to and I think that is reflected in this album. It's a bit more positive and upbeat, looking toward something good. It makes me happy to listen to it.

PRT: When you're on tour, I guess it can be kind of chaotic as well, while at the same time a bit of a routine. Do you all have your little rituals to stay sane?

Greg: Yeah, we've all found exercise is really good for our mental health. Natalie and I exercise a lot at home and we try and bring that on tour. I like to run and when we are in a new city, I go for a run, see the sights, and it also is a kind of meditation. That's one of the small things we've found that helps us stay healthy. Otherwise you are drinking a lot, eating bad food because you don't have a choice. So you've got to find some little bit of normality and that routine definitely helps.

Natalie: Over here it's quite hard to find the time and the energy to go for a run or something like that. We are playing these later shows and they're going for a lot longer. So then we get back at 1:00 AM and have to leave again at 10:00 AM. So we’ll bring in different goals and challenges for everyone. This tour we're all aiming to do a thousand push-ups for the 30 days, and it's kind of grown a little bit from that. We've got a few more things going on.

Greg: Health is an important thing and physical health and mental health are so interlinked. And if you're going to be doing a job like this, it's really easy to go the wrong way. There's alcohol everywhere, there's cigarettes everywhere. The things that can make you feel worse are omnipresent. So you need to balance that out somehow.

Natalie: Being on tour is probably one of the most organized, structured parts of my life. When I'm at home, I don't have that rhythm, which sometimes leads to more chaos at home when you are trying to juggle all of the things that exist. Whereas on tour, the only job that I've got to do is get on stage, be in the van, go to sleep. So it sounds chaotic, but the routine is definitely there.

PRT: The new album still has the same kind of energy as the other ones, but it also feels slicker. Was that a deliberate choice? 

Greg: It was a deliberate choice. I produced all of the albums and wanted to see what it's like to make a more produced-sounding Press Club record rather than a really organic and raw one, which would be the name for the older ones. And it was also the nature of the beast, because we had less time than we would normally have together to write the songs. So we had to make them in the studio. We didn't play the songs before we recorded them, we just made them as we went.

Natalie: Definitely a different writing process to the last albums. For album one and two, and half of three, it was all four of us in a room with our instruments just playing the music, see what comes out, write 40 songs, and then narrow it down to the best ones. Whereas with this one, as Greg said, we didn't have as much time as we had in the past. So all of our time that we had for this album was very focused and very deliberate.

Greg: And I think the songs sound focused and deliberate because of that, which is a good thing. What would you call it? Progression? But what we'll do on the next one, who knows. I don't necessarily want to get more and more mainstream or produced or slicker, but I really enjoyed the challenge of seeing what it would sound like if we did.

Natalie: We were very fortunate that we have three albums where we've developed a sound for ourselves. They're not all exactly the same album by any means. They're all very different in my eyes. And to be able to get to the fourth one and be like, ‘Well, we've already established this. Let's see what happens when we wear our influences on our sleeves, and let the songs drive the direction rather than us mold something into what we think a Press Club song should be. And that was very freeing.

PRT: Greg, you've produced all four Press Club albums. Was that out of necessity at first or did it seem like the natural way of doing things right off the bat?

Greg: I think it seemed like the natural way of doing things, but also you save a lot of money by not having a third party. We’ve always said that if someone has the ability to do something in our band, we'd do it ourselves. Natalie does all the graphic design and layout, Frank handles the accounts, Ian does the social media. Why involve someone else if we all have the ability to do it? And it's what I do as a job anyway. I am a producer, so it made sense.

Natalie: It would almost be offensive to go to someone else. We did try once. We had originally planned to go to Berlin and record at a studio in Berlin. But then COVID hit so that was that. And for us, the DIY ethos has always been very strong. Sometimes to a negative point. We have trouble relinquishing that control.

Greg: We want to be an independent band. We want to own all our own recordings. We want to be able to make all our own merch. We want to be able to connect with our fans. I think that's really important as a band now. We've seen it go the wrong way so many times for our peers. They get into contracts they can't get out of, and then you can see them and their sound change. Not because they wanted to, but because someone told them to. I don't think that's a good thing for a band personally. It's not how I want to make music as an artist.

Natalie: For us, it's always about the art and the creation of something that we enjoy both writing and playing live.

PRT: Can it be challenging for you to wear two caps in the studio?

Greg: Yeah. Oh my God. I mean, I question the choice.

Natalie: We've gone through some major mental turmoils. Greg puts himself out there on this creative level that is above the band. He's like, ‘here, what do you think of this?’ And I do the same thing with artwork. And we've definitely had times where the responses don’t come fast enough and it can very easily get into your head. It can be very challenging to put yourself out there like that. And that’s where the communication - like we’ve said before - becomes a pivotal part of being able to be a functional band and to get things moving in a nice way. All it takes is someone to acknowledge that you've sent something and say that they’ll take a closer look later.

PRT: Being from Australia, does that feel like it sets you at a disadvantage in terms of touring in other countries?

Greg: It definitely does. We don't have access to coming over here as readily. It costs a lot of money just to fly everyone over here or to print merchandise and all that. So it is definitely tricky. But I also think it's the reason why there's so much quality music coming out of Australia. It's almost like you need to be top tier in order to break out of Australia. So it's both a blessing and a curse.

PRT: I was wondering about that… growing up, I think the only Australian bands that I knew were like AC/DC or INXS. Whereas in recent years, there has been an explosion of great bands. Is that really the case or are we just now paying attention?  

Greg: I think you’re just paying more attention now.

Natalie: Yeah, but the other thing is that we are making a lot more of an effort to branch out of Australia. It would be so easy to be confined in the country. It's so big, but it's also very small. We don't have the population so if you want to develop a bigger audience, you have to make a big leap of faith and just do it. We were so fortunate we had a good team around us to be able to come over. We were originally with Hassle Records who helped us get our first four or five tours, and released our first three albums.  

PRT: I'm seeing you guys live for the first time today. I've read that your drummer and your bassist like to improvise a lot. Does that keep you on your toes? 

Natalie: I think we all improvise. Not a single show is a carbon copy of another. It's always unique to that specific moment in time. The crowd gives you things and you give them other things back. And sometimes we play off of each other. Our drummer and bass player are doing that all the time. But yeah, we're a live band. We don't play to click. We don't play to tracks. We're just four people in a room having a lot of fun.