The following conversation took place on October 18, 2019 at The Reach Foundation HQ in Collingwood, Melbourne. Journalist for The Guardian Brodie Lancaster, herself having grown up as a Horrorshow fan, conducted this interview with the duo, the only one that took place for the promotion of New Normal. It is presented here in its entirety, with only minor edits for the purpose of clarity.

How are you feeling today, with the record being out finally?

SOLO: It’s a real mixed bag of emotions and a long journey that that gets you to this point, but it feels good to have it out. Starting to get like people hitting us up and sending us love and stuff. It’s a nice feeling.

ADIT: I'm pumped. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. We kind of announced that we finished the album like two months ago. So people have known it's coming for a little while so it's been just heaps of anticipation on all fronts.

Can you tell me about the time it’s taken to get here?

S: It’s been a really crazy time for us. I guess about six weeks after we released Bardo State, the last record, and maybe like two months after Adit got married, someone very close to me, someone who I really love and treasure, was diagnosed with [stage four] cancer. And everything just kind of turned upside down overnight. I kind of had to step up and really take on the kind of carer role for that person and assist them with navigating that whole journey.

We had a gig booked [at SoundSet festival] in the United States that we had to cancel, which was like a real bucket list thing for us, but we had to just can it. But we had just had the album come out and we had a massive national tour booked and we had to kind of weigh up whether to go ahead with all that or not.

And we wanted to honour the record we'd made and keep the wheels turning on what we've been working on building over all this time. So we went ahead with the next couple of years of touring and it's just been a crazy time going back and forth between that role and that environment of like being in the hospital and helping someone through really, really dire times, being in a very quiet sober, somber environment and dealing with some really heavy stuff, and you know supporting someone. And then kind of going back out on the road and being in a loud, noisy, not sober, not somber, celebratory place where all eyes are on you and you're the center of attention. And just navigating all of that for me has been very difficult.

And then as if that kind of wasn't enough for us to be dealing with, I don't know how much later … Two years? Eighteen months?

A: Less than a year even, like 8 to 10 months after that, my brother was diagnosed with cancer. And that was just before we started The Grey Space Tour. Nick talks about that initial news happening six weeks after we dropped the album, so that’s like peak promo mode. In the lead up while we were rehearsing for our national tour, which is the biggest tour we've ever done, you know, Enmore Theatre and 170 Russell – big venues. Before getting to all the festivals and things like that.

Juggling that with the kind of news that usually stops your life was definitely a struggle. So ten months after Nick found that news out, I found out my brother had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. February 2018. And it was while we were on a writing trip before we did The Grey Space Tour. We were away [in Currarong, a couple of hours down the NSW South Coast]. We were writing tunes and Nick was still dealing with him stepping into this sort of like carer role and the challenges of that. One of the songs that’s actually on the album, we wrote on this trip, Yearn For You.

That week was really nice for us to kind of get away step outside of Sydney put ourselves in a different headspace, just be super creative and not have to think about life or anything else. Then pretty much the day I got back my dad calls me and says that my brother has been diagnosed with cancer as well. So that was like pretty shocking and that's again a couple of weeks before we were about to start The Grey Space Tour. So that was pretty heavy news to kind of deal with.

Somehow those two stories, both people who are incredibly like close to us. It’s not like you’re just supporting them once a week, or you’re in [and then] you’re out: it's like everyday kind of thing. That ended up shaping what the last couple of years looked like while we were also trying to do our careers.

That sort of thing is probably like a common thing for people who face serious illness who are younger. There's no good time to fall seriously ill but I think when you're younger and you've got your whole life ahead of you, you're still building that life [and] it's definitely a different kind of experience.

It sounds like there was a lot of compartmentalisation that had to happen between the two.

S: There was a real sense of moving between two worlds and for me, like … Sorry, I'm probably gonna get a bit emotional a few times throughout this conversation, but …  There's a strange thing when you make – [Adit hands him a tissue] thanks man – when you make records like they often become like a sort of forward manifestation of what the next couple of years of your life will be like. Because the songs almost become like mantras and you're repeating them and it's that message you're putting out in the world. And it wasn't lost on me that our last album was called Bardo State and … the idea of the bardo [in Tibetan Buddhism] is all about being caught between two lives on earth, and you know looking back on it I do feel as if like in some strange way it kind of foreshadowed what the next couple of years would be like for the two of us at different points, moving back and forth between two lives. And trying to like not lose yourself and your shit in that in that process [laughs]. It's definitely a lot of compartmentalization, because also like we when we're out on the road and when we're making music together or doing the things that we do together, like, you know, you’re still experiencing those massive highs and loving doing what we do. And there's also … a few thousand people have paid for a ticket and they've come to see you and so there's a sense of wanting to live up to that and just wanting to do that justice as well. So that to a certain extent you have to be able to put some of that personal stuff aside if you are struggling. And then also when you come home and you're comforting someone or being with someone who is really sick, there's a there's a sense of … you want to bring them like stories and positive things that are happening in your life and in the outside world outside the hospital and stuff, but …  you can't come home and be like, ‘We had the best time and got real wasted and we did this!’

A: That gets tackled in the first song, Against the Wall, where Nick’s like asking, how you feeling? Which is sort of like a theme of that first track. It's good to remember that everyone has to compartmentalise to a degree; everyone's got like their own struggle that they go through. You go to work and you kind of leave any like a relationship drama or things like that. People have different ways to cope with it. The way that we experienced it was … it's heightened by this by this sense of being public-facing and going up performing to people –

S: The sort of energy and intensity of those environments as well.

A: – but at the same time you also remind yourself that it can't be a chore. It's also a privilege that people came out. It's just a crazy complex mix of emotions and that's essentially what we were trying to communicate on this record. And I think we did that. And as you can see a lot of those emotions are still raw and it's not like there's a neat bow tie there … it is still like an ongoing process. And that's the idea behind the title as well. You can always be searching for this normality in your life or this time when everything's going to be perfect in life, but often it's not like that.

The title track kind of sets an intention or a dedication for the listener

S: That song always had this really beautiful kind of meditative calming quality to it. And so I knew in my mind from very early on that I wanted to end the record with that. 

I pieced that song together over a long period of time whilst we were going through all the things we just talked about and the poem or spoken word which is on there kind of came two years or so after that initial diagnosis and everything for me. I went overseas to America, finally when things had kind of calmed down enough and things were safe enough at home that I felt that I could go away for a period of time. I went to America and I went to Minneapolis to the festival that we had had to cancel going to [one year earlier], and while I was there, like the first day I was there, I went for a walk and it was this beautiful sunny day and I found this spot in the middle of Minneapolis in the Mississippi, there's an island and it’s this really, really old part of the city and it's got these beautiful old houses and they're painted in these amazing colors. Everybody that lives on that island has a lot of money so they've got these really fancy gardens and stuff.

I just found this really calm spot with a bench just surrounded by trees and stuff and I just sat down and put that beat on and just kind of scribbled and that that poem came out of me. I felt that I wanted to use that format because I found that the restriction of like having to write something that was a rap and fitted really rhythmically over a beat was too constrictive for what I was trying to get across and so that's why I picked that format. But also because I did want to give the sense of really speaking directly to the listener.  And you know in a funny way, what I like about that poem and why I'm proud of it and why I felt it was the kind of thing to finish with is in my mind, you know at the same time I'm kind of talking to and wrote that for the person in my life who I love and who I supported through that journey, for the listener - for anybody out there who's struggling with things similar or different to what I've been going through, and also to myself. In my mind, the way it's written, it can be addressed to whoever needs it, whoever needs to hear it. And I just liked the idea that if somebody out there was struggling that they could put that on and that it might help them to just calm down and feel a little bit better.

I was really wary of it being … I didn't want it to be cheesy and like everything's going to be alright, because sometimes everything isn't going to be alright, or it's not going to turn out how you would like it to – and in fact most of the time it won't. But what's important and what I've kind of learned over the last couple of years and what I'm still trying to learn is that you have to accept, things happen in life, and shit doesn't turn out how you thought it would but you can still be happy and you can still be grateful and be appreciative of what you have. Even if it isn't what you thought you would have. And that's something that I've talked a lot about with Adit over the last couple of years and something that his advice and his perspective and his friendship through this time has helped me to get closer to that.

Shouts to the Dalai Lama as well and the Art of Happiness which is a book that Adit gave me for my 30th birthday.  And it's a really difficult thing to grapple with but it's a pretty fundamental thing in life and I suppose I feel as if I'm still learning that and still putting it into practice and I didn't want that song to feel like, Hey, I figured it out. I've sorted it out. I've got the answers. Here they are. Because I don't and that's not how life works. But what I guess the last couple of years has taught me and speaking with friends like Adit and also watching the person who I supported through this and their attitude and the way they have carried themselves has shown me that's all you can really do and fall back on is bringing that perspective and that hope and optimism and acceptance in the face of adversity to your life. The best thing you can do for yourself to try and give yourself the tools to cope with what life throws at you and to be happy and find happiness.

And so I *tried* [laughs] to convey all that in the form of this song and we decided to put it there at the last moment. And I do like the idea that people out there right now listening to the record for the first time and there's so many different emotions and highs and lows and ups and downs and there are angry feelings and sad feelings and all the rest of it and what you arrive at at the end is not like a “yeah! We made it and everything's okay!” But more of what I feel is kind of like a mantra or meditation almost that you can put on and listen to and then it might just help remind you of that ongoing process of acceptance

I was… in that in that moment, in the park in Minneapolis, I was very present. I was on the other side of the world in a place where nobody knows me and I guess it was just one of those moments that that kind of hits you and I feel really proud of that song. It's one of my favourite songs off the record of one of my favorite songs that we've ever made. 

I hope and I believe that it will help at least one person out there in a moment of weakness or darkness, you know. It’s probably going to help me too, to come back to it and listen to it. I've had a few moments to it already. I remember the morning that we finished the album, that was like the last thing that we did. We’d been on this studio bender for weeks doing like 12- 14 hour days in the studio. And the last morning we had this deadline we had to meet and it was 8:00 a.m and poor old Adit was sitting there with me like chopping up different takes of that fucking poem and we finished it and printed the song and the sun was coming up and I remember walking home and listening to that song and I went to the park in Newtown, sat on a park bench and just cried and reflected on everything that the two of us have been through to get to that point to make that tune. It's a pivotal moment on the record for me.

What does it mean to put a record like this out?

A: It's the most personal record that we've done to date. Somehow. As if we couldn't get any more personal than some of our other records, we somehow we managed to do that. And that's going to be there forever.

So it's definitely going to shape conversations that we have we have in the future with fans, but people already come up to us at shows and they're like, oh, you know The Rain helped us with this or you know, we walked down the aisle to Walk You Home … just little anecdotes like that. We've often talked about how sometimes the merch desk or me just hanging out and signing things, either of us -mostly Nick- will have to play like a therapist to someone who comes up and wants to share something about themselves, so in a lot of ways, I think this is like a continuation of that.

It is more personal. We're dealing with some heavier subjects particularly in how it relates to our lives. We've definitely opened up a lot more. Heightening that experience with people … I mean personally I do hope when we see punters out there that they come up and they're like, oh, you know, I listen to that poem in New Normal and it helped me through something - that's kind of like the whole point. Otherwise why did we do that?

It is like a personal form of like catharsis as well, processing the last couple of years.

The other side of that, the flip side of the warm and fuzzy stuff is also like … we've made these songs, are we kind of now holding ourselves back? Because all these songs are about like these little pockets of time and some of those times are dark or they're sad or they’re painful. So are we just bottling up that pain to just take with us forever now? That's a thought that's entered our minds

S: Yeah - when you work on a record, it keeps you in that headspace or in those memories or in those experiences that led to you creating those songs. And one thing that we're both hoping and Adit has encouraged in me because, I'll be honest it is very nerve-wracking for me to release this record … and even to have a conversation like this. I haven't really spoken to anyone that I don't know really well about these experiences, let alone to a journalist. So I thank you for your patience during this conversation, but you know, as I've had my moments where I freaked out about this, Adit has reminded me like, “bro, this is part of the process and we have to let this go”.

Once you make these songs and you do bottle up those feelings, the next step in the process is - literally they call it a release, you know - you release it out into the world. People listen and connect and they attach their own meaning and they make connections with their own experiences and eventually all of those feelings and emotions and attachment – all of that energy gets thrown in the mix as well. And the music will take on a life of its own and it won't just be ours anymore and it won't just be our thing to kind of carry around; it will have gone out in the world and made its own space and its own meaning for people. I think that's kind of what we're hoping we’ll get to.

A: To me it's not about bottling up that pain and having it weigh you down for the rest of your life. It's also like finding the beauty in it. Because that pain is kind of what makes us human: we’re vulnerable, we feel, there's emotions. And finding a way to communicate that to someone else, a stranger, having someone relate to that, I think that's a beautiful thing and also being able to process it is like an important … [to] not fear it, move past it and hold onto it.

S: We have always used our music as a form of therapy, ever since we were teenagers and it is that process of whittling it down into a form that rhymes, or you come up with those chords that capture that feeling, and you’re kind of taking these things that can be so hard to grapple with and working it into a framework where it rhymes and it has musical sections and you can put it on for three or four minutes and distill it.

There's also been a sense, for me, with this record, of like trying to make something positive out of a lot of intense and painful stuff, and I feel proud that we've been able to wrestle with all this stuff and turn it into this record – what is it, like 51 minutes or some shit? – and then give it to everyone else and hope that they find something in it, that it has value to them and helps them. And I guess you also have to have faith in that process because there was a time when like I would cry listening to Walk You Home, which is now over 10 years old. At that time was an incredibly painful thing to make and a painful thing to listen to or whatever, and then you look at what that song has gone on to do in the world and all the positive memories that have come with it. All the marriage proposals we've facilitated at our shows from it or –

A: It's a breakup song that people get married to. Beauty in pain.

S:  – Totally. So we’ve got to have faith in that process and releasing the songs is the next step in that process.

A: [We’re] definitely talking about the next music we make maybe being a bit more fun a bit less introspective. Looking outward.

Thinking about others is a key thing that can make you feel connected and also make you feel like you're not alone. That's something we look at in Up All Night. And one of the collaborators on the record, I.E., introduced us to this new word ‘sonder’, and like we had to look it up, I'd never heard of before. And sonder is like this realization that everyone is kind of going through their own struggle just captured in one word.

S: There's a moment on that song where I'm talking about looking at all the skyscrapers of New York City – I wrote it on that same trip that I mentioned before – just looking at all of those all of those windows and all of those buildings and thinking about how many people are in those windows in those buildings, doing their best to live their lives and dealing with whatever struggle that they are undoubtedly having in their lives and I think towards the back end of the record and the back end of this journey that has been a really important thing to remember. It is very easy to get caught up in your own issues, your own struggle, your own challenges and the things that are weighing you down and there is a power and a comfort in remembering that everybody's going through something. And whilst not everybody's going through the same thing, that fact, that process that we're all struggling and doing the best that we can to get through it in our own way, dealing with whatever's on our plate, is a powerful thing that can help you feel not alone, that can help you feel connected to other people.

Again, shouts to the Dalai Lama and the Power of Happiness – one of the things that he talks about the thing that unites us all as humans is we're all going through some shit and you don't know what's happening for the person next to you on the street or your coworker or your friend or the person in the band that you're going to see or whatever. But it's humbling to remember that everyone's going through something and you're not alone. If we are all going through something there’s a togetherness and a goal and a reason for helping each other and being there for each other and helping each other to get through.

You two experienced a really literal version of that, of “everyone's going through their own thing” considering you both went through this at kind of the same time.

A: We were sort of on the tail end of our Bardo State cycle – a year after we put that out and right before we started the Grey Space tour. [My brother] went into surgery to take the tumor out, chemo. And all of 2018 was pretty much caring for him and trying to get him through that. And he lost his battle with it. January 5 this year he passed away.

There's like a whole other layer to that story. He was living at home with my parents. So they were really the primary carers, I’m there every second day [or] every third day to support them [and] support my bro. He would come over to my place and stay like once a month and he had a whole other set of challenges as well. He was living with autism, very severe autism. So yeah, just like really kind of complex stuff to deal with and process. Looking at the way that my parents handled it, to them there was no chance to stop and think when you're faced with something like that. It's like a reflex, your survival instincts kick in and I know that Nick experienced that as well. It's just about surviving. You just you do what needs to be done.

So that was the mode that we were in a lot of last year. It was survival mode. Towards the end of that we realized he wasn't going to make it and then we just made the most of the time that we had with him. I took great strength in watching my brother – and like, the song Limitless is a dedication to him and his struggle. His name is Ashim, which in Sanskrit means Limitless. I thought there was a beauty in that. My mum always talked about him as being like an angel. He was non-verbal, he couldn’t speak but he was just this ball of joy, like very affectionate. That's what he wanted. He just wanted to be around people. [He] loved coming over and staying with me and my wife, and loved just being around people. Loved attention, was always an attention seeker, you know. He would just like sit down, stare at you and smile and like lean in for a kiss. That was the energy that he always brought [and] he exhibited that through this whole struggle, right to the end. He couldn't even say, you know, why me, but it didn't even feel like that was like a thought that had entered [his mind]. So in that journey, I found the epitome of that that idea of, you know, looking outward and looking at the way other people face adversity and really finding strength in that. 

S: Also, we found a lot of strength in each other in the last couple of years.  Adit and I have been friends since we were like 12, 13 years old and we've been brothers for a long time. But the events of the last couple of years I think brought us even closer and made us appreciate each other even more, because we've been able to lean on each other at various times throughout these couple of years and also look at each other as an example of how to carry oneself and how to approach these kinds of situations. I know that I'm not sure how I could have really made it through the last couple of years without having Adit to lean on and in times when Adit had a lot on his plate, I like to think that I was able to be there for him and help him with the challenges on his plate.

A: We, like, passed the baton to each other basically. That brought us closer together and we've reflected on that a bunch of times where I've just been like, I haven't been in the right headspace to do certain things and Nick's there to support me through that period, whether I just need to be there with the family during this time and he goes out and sorts the things that we need to do for Horrorshow. And coming back to him for advice on you know, how he dealt with some of the intense things that he had to deal with– going to hospital and going to [Sydney cancer hospital Chris O’Brien] Lifehouse – that's somewhere we both spent like a long time. Our relationship I think is stronger than ever and we've reflected on that a lot this year particularly. This has been a very reflective year.

S: I remember the morning we finished the record, we had a conversation about how we've worked harder on this album than anything we've ever done before but that it didn't really feel like hard work - in the sense of like, we weren’t butting heads or getting frustrated with each other or anything like that. There's been a sense of teamwork there and of a common purpose and goal and just a deep kind of understanding between us.  It's been a really, really crazy few years. And I know when I look back on it, right in the middle of that storm … Adit and I were right there in the thick of it together.

Nick mentioned you gave him The Art of Happiness as a gift – was that after you had read it first?

A: I’ve read The Art of Happiness. I was raised as a Buddhist. So my parents would kind of like talk to me about various things, and one of those life mantras, which is at the centre of Buddhism, is life is suffering. Sometimes people hear that and they're like, oh that's such a dark depressing way to look at things. And it's like, well actually it's more just like an acknowledgement of what life is. That's a certainty, that there will be suffering and you’ve got to accept that and it's about what you do with it that really counts because everyone experiences that. So that’s how I was brought up and then I read that book and it really distilled a lot of the ideas around pleasure and pain and happiness – what actually *is* happiness. One of the key takeaways was also like pleasure being like a transient thing, something that like comes and goes. Whereas happiness is this eternal thing that you know, the Dalai Lama talks about, that may not be attainable for most of us, but it's something that really comes from within.

It's something that like shaped my worldview a lot and the way I approach things and the way that I approach challenges. Just helped me heaps. Of course I gave it to Nick. We spoke about it during the making of the last record [Bardo State] and so it was really just high time that I gave him a copy of the book.

S: [He] gave it to me for my 30th. I've learned so much from Adit and his perspective on life over the years and he's not perfect like anyone, but his perspective I think comes from his family and his upbringing and some of those beliefs.

A: I very much learned that from seeing my brother and the way that he lived his life and approached everything and seeing the way that my parents cared, how they cared for him and for us. That’s another thing: through all that adversity, what a privilege to have a family like that. So many people don't have a family unit in that sort of way. They’re some of the things that have shaped shaped us.

After listening to Before the Dawn, I wanted to ask - where is the light and hope coming from for you?

A: To me, that is the darkness in your head. It's about what's going on inside your head. It's not about what's going on – your surroundings or environment affects your head. But really that song is about a struggle.

S: Adit really encouraged me on that song to lean into that darkness and to not resolve it. In the original version of the song by the end, I sort of tried to resolve it and be like, things are going to be okay and Adit encouraged me to rewrite that ending and get closer to the essence of what I was actually trying to say, which is you have those moments and those times where you get caught up and engulfed by that darkness – and I'm still going through those periods and those ups and downs. It's a little bit fitting to me that we're doing this interview here today at [The Reach Foundation] because five or six years ago I was asked to speak at an event here downstairs. Reach Foundation do all this amazing work with young people here in Melbourne, and obviously their big focus is mental health and they do this thing called Heroes Day and they asked me to come here and speak to, it would have been like 5 or 600 high school kids here. And I did an interview up on the stage talking about mental health and talking about my journey so far and about The Grey Space and all of those mental health challenges that I experienced at that time in my life [my teenage years], which is over 10 years ago now. And here we are and I'm in the same building talking about similar struggles in very different circumstances, very, very different life events and external things, but I still struggle with that stuff, I still go through ups and downs with it.

That tune was about leaning into the darkness and exploring it and documenting it with the knowledge that it will get better. Even if it doesn't feel like it at that moment. And those verses are some of the most intense things that I've ever written on those topics and they came from a very dark place.

We don't know what's going to happen next in our lives. Nobody does.  But we do know that what we have some control over is the things we tell ourselves and the thought processes that we entrench within ourselves. I agree with that assessment that that song is really saying, “even when you're at your lowest and your darkest and it feels like nothing will ever feel okay again, It's worth remembering that’s not true. There are things you can do. There are things you can change. There are different messages you can tell yourself that will see you through that darkness.”