Hatchie gave up on chasing fame in LA, and she has no regrets

Harriette Pilbeam is not going to order a coffee. The singer otherwise known as Hatchie is sitting in a quiet corner of Sydney’s Ace Hotel bar on a warm and glittering Sydney spring day, contemplating another hit of caffeine on a busy day of press engagements. It’s a fraught exercise.

“I really cooked it once,” Pilbeam laughs, as she selects a soft drink from the menu. “I had like five coffees before doing [a TV spot]; I couldn’t find my words. Anyway, I’m better at the caffeine situation now.”

Pilbeam is in the middle of a lightning-fast trip to Sydney ahead of the release of her third album, Liquorice. It arrives after a period of simplicity and quiet in Pilbeam’s life, having left Los Angeles after a frenetic few years to move back to Australia (she now calls Melbourne home with her partner, musician Joe Agius).

Hatchie’s rise was swift. Having cut her teeth throughout the 2010s as part of Brisbane outfits Go Violets and Babaganouj, Pilbeam launched Hatchie in 2017 with the dreamy, alt-pop single Try. The 2018 EP Sugar & Spice followed, before her debut album Keepsake landed in 2019 to warm reviews from hard-to-please critics like Pitchfork. Her second album Giving the World Away, led by the rushing pop single Quicksand, was another hit with critics.

It was, by any measure, a very successful start to a solo career. But after a few dizzying years of releases and touring and starting a new life in Los Angeles, Pilbeam felt empty.

“I was definitely at a low point mentally after the last album,” Pilbeam says, as a Coke Zero is delivered to the table. “I put a lot of pressure on myself, and it performed fine. It didn’t perform badly. I think the issue was that the early [music] took off really quickly, and every time I went back to certain places, certain countries or continents, the venues were twice as big. It has to plateau at some point, unless you’re Billie Eilish. I set unrealistic expectations, and I was like, well, if we’re coming back and it’s not doing twice as well as last time, that means we’ve failed.

“I really wasn’t taking it all in or processing it or congratulating myself or celebrating anything,” Pilbeam continues. “I was like, ‘Okay, cool, onto the next thing … we can do better’. I just always thought I could do better.”

Amid this crisis in confidence, life in Los Angeles had reached a low point. In the space of a particularly distressing week, Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, a shooting occurred close to their house, and Pilbeam and Agius both caught a bad round of COVID-19. It prompted serious conversations about where they wanted to live, where they felt safe. “We were like, ‘Let’s just go home. We can go home. Why not?’” Pilbeam says.

But it wasn’t a decision they made lightly. “In a way, I had a little bit given up on my music doing well in Australia because I felt really out of place,” Pilbeam says. “Anytime we booked a festival, it felt like we were this outlier on these line-ups … It felt like there was more of a market [in LA] for us.

“There was definitely a feeling of being embarrassed that we didn’t stay for longer,” she says. “But I mean … we never said ‘we’re gonna live here for 10 years’. I’ve come to terms with that, and I don’t care any more. But in that moment, it was a difficult decision. It felt like we were giving up a little bit, but I don’t regret it at all.”

‘I had isolated myself because I thought that’s what I needed to do to progress with my career ... I realised it wasn’t worth it. I need friends.’

Pilbeam and Agius landed back in Brisbane and moved in with her parents (“Damn, rock bottom,” Pilbeam laughs), and the abrupt pause allowed her to think clearly. She went back to work, went to therapy, played her Nintendo Switch, had singing lessons, had board game nights. Yes, she even started knitting (“Only recently,” she points out). And she poured her energy into her friendships, feeling like she’d neglected them for years as the Hatchie project raced around the world.

“I felt really isolated,” she says frankly. “I had isolated myself because I thought that’s what I needed to do to progress with my career. I was just like, ‘It’s okay if you miss out on people’s birthdays or weddings or big life events, as long as you’re working towards being more successful it’ll all be worth it one day’. And then after a while, I realised it wasn’t worth it. I need friends. So I turned around and worked on that and worked on myself.”

The slow and steady pace of life also undid Pilbeam’s tightly held expectations about her music and career. She began writing streams of consciousness as a way to break her habit of spending hours and hours making one song better. She wrote “bad songs and bad music”, telling herself that she didn’t need to show anyone, that it was just for her, and nothing had to come of it.

“It helped me figure out what I enjoyed about it and helped me realise that I do want to keep doing this, just on different terms,” she says. “I’d set a lot of limitations and expectations on myself, and I just kind of forced myself to stop doing that.”

The process also unlocked her third album, the dreamy, love-filled Liquorice. Through her streams of consciousness and scribbled tracks, Pilbeam noticed a familiar theme emerging: infatuation, lust, and heady, almost delusional romance. Soon, she was tunnelling back through memories of her early 20s, when she was an “unhinged lover girl”.

“As we all probably were!” Pilbeam laughs. “When you’re younger, before you’re in a real relationship, you take everything so seriously. You’re replaying the smallest interactions in your head for weeks, and you’re just romanticising your pinkies touching. The electricity that you feel is unparalleled.”

On Giving The World Away, Pilbeam worked with producers Jorge Elbrecht and Dan Nigro – you might know him by the music of Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. “I would never afford him now,” Pilbeam quips. For Liquorice, she opted for Melina Duterte, who releases music under the name Jay Som. Together with Agius, Pilbeam and Duterte set about building the luscious wall of dream-pop that defines Liquorice.

Clearly inspired by dream-pop and shoegaze icons like the Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star, Hatchie’s voice floats through curtains of glassy guitars (see lead single and standout Lose It Again) and reverb-heavy kick drums (another standout, Only One Laughing). Layers and layers of guitars dosed with chorus pedals fill every gap. Then there’s Hatchie herself, sounding freer and more exuberant than ever before.

“If there was one thing that I planned, it was just that I wanted it to sound natural and DIY and messy, because that’s how love feels,” Pilbeam explains. “It’s very messy and fuzzy and confusing, but warm and comforting … it was more about recreating feelings rather than telling stories.”

When Pilbeam started Hatchie nearly 10 years ago, the project came with a strict mission statement. “I had so many rules. In hindsight, they were restrictions, but at the time I was like, ‘These are my goals’. I was like, ‘I don’t want to be described as synth-pop. I don’t want to be described as X, Y, Z.’ I had all these things that I didn’t want to be.”

She pauses for a long time. “Now it just feels more like me, rather than something I’m trying to be.”

Hatchie’s Liquorice is out now.