Hatchie - Liquorice

Harriette Pilbeam's third album as Hatchie arrives as her most personal and most joyfully undone, a record rough around the edges in all the right ways and consumed by the overwhelming, exhilarating, transforming side-effects of infatuation. The cover says everything: Pilbeam laughing, smudged red lipstick, the glorious aftermath of a kiss captured on a dinky digital camera during a spontaneous backyard photo shoot. This is not the careful, polished arrival of a musician playing it safe. This is someone letting herself be seen.

Written across 2022 to 2024 in Brisbane and Melbourne, Liquorice finds Pilbeam writing from scratch without specific musical influences in mind for the first time, allowing songs to breathe for weeks rather than rushing ideas, embracing her musical insecurities as a defining feature rather than a problem to solve. After working with high-profile producers Jorge Elbrecht and Dan Nigro on the preceding Giving the World Away, she wanted to complete this record with a single collaborator, ideally a non-male producer who also fronts their own musical project. She found the perfect partner in Melina Duterte, who records indie rock under the name Jay Som and carries GRAMMY-winning production credits on boygenius' the record. The two worked together in Los Angeles in September 2024, and the chemistry is palpable throughout.

The album is preoccupied with what Pilbeam calls the finite forever, those love stories that are entirely real and entirely transformative even when they only last a single magical night. Now 32 and married, she found that the eternal feelings of longing, lust, and regret from her younger years rushed back with full force as she reflected on them, and she channeled them alongside a deep fondness for tragic romance movies where the characters do not find their happy ending together. As she puts it: "I'm a hopeless romantic and a very silly person, sometimes to a fault." Liquorice is the sound of both of those things at once, sweet, salty, and bitter in every bite, exactly like the titular candy.