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ON THE COUCH WITH: Hilltop Hoods

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ARTIST INTERVIEW

Access All Areas.net.au: Hey Pressure, how’s it going today?
MC Pressure: Hey Ben, good thanks, just at home today, doing a heap of press for the new record & just taking it easy really.

Access All Areas.net.au: Your latest record “State Of The Art” has just been released, how’s it be doing?
MC Pressure: Its good, we won’t know about sales until a week or so but all reviews & things like that have been good. We are hoping for some good numbers, we had the record featured on Triple J last week so thats helped promote the material to the public, so if all goes well we should have a good result & maybe another no. 1 but we’ll just see how things go.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the record, is it fair to say you guys spent a long time working on this one?
MC Pressure: It certainly is mate, we had the hard road come out 3 years ago & the restrung version out 2 years ago so since then its been about 2 years or so of working on the record. We had a long time on this one & we spent the time making the best tracks we could as a group here in our home studio in Adelaide. The record is a real effort & we worked as hard as possible to make this one hopefully our biggest & best record to date.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the writing of the tracks, did this take a while?
MC Pressure: Well we spent a pretty long time working on our lyrics, obviously as we share the tracks its not as long as it could be but we spent a fair amount of time on these lyrics. We spent the time to write a lot of things, we had a lot of different topics to write about & we showed these well we feel in the content on our songs.

Access All Areas.net.au: You & MC Suffa have solo tracks on the record, did you guys spend a little longer on these?
MC Pressure: Well i don’t think it was longer than any other, obviously as they’re solo tracks we spend longer writing as the tracks not shared vocally with the other MC but these tracks came together well & we have both got great tracks that we’re happy with & i think show our MC skills pretty well.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the music for the tracks, was it a long procedure to make these beats in the studio for this record?
MC Pressure: Well we had some guest beats provided from overseas & some guest beats from here in Australia but for about 9 or 10 songs it was simply Suffa on production with the beats. For these 9 or 10 songs he created about two to three hundred different tracks & we took the best from each & made what we could out of these & from thee we got the beats for the record. Looking back its like what we thought was not good is actually really good & its like why didn’t we use that haha but what we have is pretty awesome anyway so its all good. This album is definitely created well & should show some great beats.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the music, you had guest instrumentation from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, some piano work & also guitars on the record, was this done to give more of a live feel to the record?
MC Pressure: Yeah well it was more of a step forward in the creation of our hiphop music & the limits of what we could do to make a beat for a hiphop song. I mean we could have just kept it to what we do usually with the tracks that are produced in the studio, but we wanted more than just that. We knew we had the orchestra resource after the restrung record, so we called on them to do some string sections on a few tracks which works well. We had the guys from the Adelaide group Lowrider help us out with Piano sections which was great & then we also had Suffa’s brother in playing guitar on a bunch of tracks so its all a step forward in the creation of our music & also i guess a way of bringing a live feel to the record.

Access All Areas.net.au: You have a couple guest MC’s on teh record in Trials from the Funkoars & the US MC Ferra Montch, what was the idea behind so little guests & how was it working with these two MC’s?
MC Pressure: Well with the lack of guest MC’s its pretty simple really, we both feel in the group that these days too many hiphop releases are coming out where you see on pretty much every track a guest MC & really thats too much sometimes to see. I feel with the amount of guests you see it really takes it away from the artist & they seem to lose control of their record as the guests always won’t have the same direction or ideas as the artist. We had a few guests in the past on records, but we felt we should just bring it down & have artists we feel would work well & that we respect so we went with the two we have. Working with Trials is always so much fun, he’s a great artist, MC & productionist so he was a definite fit. With Ferra Montch he was a real pleasure to work with, he came out from the states for a week & we did the track. He was really cool to hang with & he stayed with us & shard stories & was just a real hippie in a sense when it came to music as he was so cool. He was a real icon for me as i love the work he did in the early 90’s when i was first getting into hiphop i listened to him so to have him record with us was such a pleasure.

Access All Areas.net.au: The first single from the record is ‘chase that feeling, can you tell us about this?
MC Pressure: Well this track is pretty much about getting a feeling of success or just a good feeling & keeping with it & yeah its just about having a good time & feeling good & its a pretty cool track we feel so we figured we could use it as a single.

Access All Areas.net.au: The record is to be released on the groups on label ‘Golden Era Records, whats the idea with this & many plans for this label?
MC Pressure: Well its basically to get the record back in our control, we’ve always had control, but this just gives us the control over our music on a business level. With the label we are looking to sign some up & coming hiphop artists to give them a chance to make it like we have & also to get distribution around the world which we can do through label deals, we’ve currently got deals in Canada & Germany & more on the way.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the Hard Road record, you had success with it going no. 1 on the charts & picking up a couple ARIA awards, how did this change things for you & how did you feel about these successes?
MC Pressure: Well the main thing this changed was we got to finally quit out day jobs, thats the biggest change. We had that happen as we got a heap of sales & were always touring. To have the record hit no. 1 was incredible, it was the first real hiphop release to do so fro an Australian group which was great & to pick up the ARIA awards it was such a great feeling.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the success, do you feel its been an overnight thing or just the hard work of the group paying off over the years?
MC Pressure: Well its a bit of both, the thing with us is we got in when hiphop was taking off in Australia, around 2002 – 2003 when the calling came out & people started hearing more of our type of music. Obviously people have always listened to hiphop in Australia, but the artists were starting to get airplay & we were able to get our music heard & its been a real thrill for our hard work as MC’s to pay off the way it has in the last 5 or 6 years.

Access All Areas.net.au: In the next month, you are heading out on tour, looking forward to this?
MC Pressure: I am actually, its been a long time since we got out on an actual tour of ours... not since 2006 i think when we had the stopping all stations tour, so it will be good to get out.

Access All Areas.net.au: On the tour, you have had pretty much every show sell out, was this a surprise for you guys?
MC Pressure: Well we were unsure of how it would go, we tried to book venues that would be a good size for us & it seems the audience has been waiting for us as the shows have sold really well. Its always a surprise but with the way hiphop is in Australia now its to be expected, if you work hard & produce quality beats then its something that will come.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the tour, you have the new record to showcase, will this be the center of the set?
MC Pressure: Well thats the plan, as its the record we’re touring on we will be looking to do a number of tracks from it, we’re also doing a good number from the hard road & also a few from the calling & then we’ll see about something older but will see how time goes.

Access All Areas.net.au: On the tour, you are also doing splender in the grass, looking forward to this one?
MC Pressure: Yeah, splender was our first real festival when we were becoming something & at the 2004 one i think it was we had a massive crowd that just went off. It was just after triple j had picked up the nosebleed section, so the crowd knew that & we had an awesome time there.

Access All Areas.net.au: With the near future, much happening?
MC Pressure: Well its just busy times, we’re waiting to see how the record does, then we have our tour which will be great & then we’re probably off overseas & then will come back for another tour probably.

Access All Areas.net.au: Well Pressure, its been great chatting, all the best for the record & tour, bye.
MC Pressure: Thanks Ben, thanks for this interview, bye.

Interview By: Ben Coby.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

This is State of the Art, the fifth studio album from Hilltop Hoods, Australia’s premier Hip Hop crew.

State of the Art is the Hoods’ official follow-up to their 2006 award-winning album The Hard Road.

It’s been a long time coming, but State of the Art is everything Hood fans could have wished for. It’s dark, heavy, challenging, raw and occasionally funny. It’s State of the Art in sound and soul.

Prepare to be surprised from the explosive opening track, the aptly-titled ‘The Return’, right through to the closing cut ‘Fifty In Five’, which sees the last fifty years deconstructed and reconstructed in a flash right in front of your very ears. It’s breathtaking.

State of the Art is unmistakably the Hoods, but quite unlike anything they’ve ever done before. Lots of guitars, strings and other sounds you can’t quite make out all interweaving in a cutting-edge cacophony of words, rhymes and the heaviest of samples.

Its Hilltop Hoods continuing to rewrite the Hip Hop rulebook, not only in the Australian context, but taking their challenge to the world stage as one of the first local crews to have a serious release in Europe and North America.

In 2006 their fourth album, The Hard Road changed everything, it debuted on top of the national mainstream charts, an achievement completely unprecedented in the history of Australian Hip Hop. It also won the ARIA Awards for best urban and best independent release, as well as taking out the 2006 J Award for album of the year.

A year later came the groundbreaking remix project, The Hard Road Restrung, which saw the Hood collaborate with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Restrung took out another ARIA Award for best urban release. 2007 also saw the release of the live DVD, City of Light.

Ever since then, the Hoods have worked virtually non-stop on State of the Art in their home studios in Adelaide.

Several of the new tracks, including State of the Art’s first single ‘Chase That Feeling’ (which features a return guest appearance from members from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra) took literally dozens and dozens of hours to record and edit.

Another key track, ‘Classic Example’, is a collaboration with legendary New York rapper, Pharoahe Monch. Traditional Hip Hop at it’s finest.

“This is probably the heaviest album we’ve done,” is Suffa’s summation of State of the Art. “And probably by a fair bit as well.”

“There are definitely some tougher tracks on it,” agrees Pressure. “Hopefully it’s got elements of The Hard Road and The Calling on it, and with the strings it’s got elements of Restrung. With Lowrider in there (the Hoods recent touring companions) it’s got elements of what we’ve been doing live. I’m personally more proud of this record than any other album we’ve done. I think it’s definitely our most consistent piece from start to finish.”

Making State of the Art all the more significant is that it’s the first album released through the Hoods’ very own new label Golden Era Records.

State of the Art will take the world by storm.

www.hilltophoods.com

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MY FESTIVAL EXPERIENCE

The Living End
I could probably go on for hours, but the one stand out for me was in 2003 at the Auckland Big Day Out. It was the set of the Queens Of The Stone Age & 2 songs in the gear blew up & they had to stop playing, everyone was pissed & the band was so bummed out. At about 11pm at night however, an announcement came out stating they were doing another set on a smaller stage & everyone just scrambled to get there. This set was just so energetic, so aggressive & so impressive & it really stood out as just one of the best shows I’ve had the privledge of witnessing while on tour.

Ideal Lineup?
Well for me it’s straight up ACDC as I just love them so much, I would also say U2 once again they’re really great live & play great music. I suppose the only other band I could think of would be Cog, 5they have a great live show & just fit a festival no matter where they play. So yeah, those 3 for me.

Tips for attending Music Festivals?
Well the biggest tip I can definitely give is either take or get as much water through the day as you can as it will help you so much, of course people may not take that advice as there’s other stuff to drink at festivals. Make sure you have a plan so you don’t get lost or lose time of the day & ensure you have things mapped out to know where to go for all the essentials. For me the essentials are the bar & the toilets & then the stages, so once you have the plan & the water, it’s all good.