Introducing These Guy, who just dropped a trippy video for their new single, Heaps

Brisbane band These Guy are currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia and are on quite the creative tip since making the journey to the land of the maple leaf. They've recently released their first single of the year - Heaps - a wonderfully fuzzy trip into psychedelic pop, and it's just received a very perfect new video clip. Enlisting Brisbane-based artist Helena Papageorgiou to create the song's animated video, it's a collaborative effort inspired by French sci-fi cartoon Fantastic Planet and the video work of Chad VanGaalen.

The track was already great, the clip makes it even better, and we sent the brains behind the operation, Joe Saxby, some questions to find out a little more about them.

Tell us about yourselves?

We are three guys from Brisbane who’ve spent the last year-and-a-bit all over the place, both geographically and mentally. My name is Joe but my name is also These Guy. Josh plays guitar and Eddie plays drums. Last year, we moved to Vancouver, where we shared a place, played a bunch of shows, worked on a bunch of new songs. We got over to Pop Montreal in September, played the showcase and met some folks. Then we kept on writing and recording in Vancouver, before we temporarily parted ways this past February.

What kinda tunes we talkin’?

I’ve been working on describing our new songs in a way that makes sense and doesn’t make me roll my eyes irretrievably into the back of my head. The closest I’ve come to this is the term "self-help pop". The songs are sonically bombastic. There are lots of synths and goofy rhythms, there’s guitar and drums. So I feel like I can use the word "pop". But the lyrical content is mainly about self-help, self-improvement. Some of it’s about the broader world outside. But it always brings it back to the self and that process of making sense of everything, from the inside out.

Production/writing process:

I spend quite a while getting the bare bones of each song organised and laid out. When I’m happy with the structure, I’ll palm a demo off to Josh and he’ll write and record his guitar parts. Meanwhile, I’ll be chipping away at lyrics very slowly, doing a lot of revisions. When they’re finally ready, I’ll record vocals and mix them in with the guitars and everything else. After that, we go ahead and record drums. For our new material, we recorded drums with a friend of ours, Jo Hirabayashi (from Vancouver band Jo Passed), at his studio in Gastown, which is just east of Downtown Vancouver.

When everything’s finally tracked, I usually just have to adjust a few levels and things, and then the song’s fully mixed and ready to go. In the future, I want to experiment with doing things more like an actual band - playing live parts, riffing off each other. But for now, that’s how we’ve been working.

Can you tell us about your new single, Heaps?

I’m not sure whether what I originally wrote the song about was a real thing or a fake memory, a dream of some kind. But I seem to remember one day, when I’d first moved to Vancouver, I got up in the morning and I went and reclined on a lawn chair that was always sitting there unused on the front lawn. It was the first actual sunny kind of day that we’d properly seen there. And I started to meditate and suddenly felt very ok about everything. The process of the move was very personally tumultuous, as you’d expect I guess from any big move. But that morning, I got up and sat out in the sun for a while and let myself slowly sink into my new surroundings, fading away from all the noise that had been eating away at me for the past year. So that’s the first half of the song. Sliding into the acceptance of a new reality. And then the second half turns into a love song. It’s kind of like, now that I’ve got my own shit worked out, I can concentrate on the other half. “Let’s be together heaps,” is the line.

We’ve also released a sweet animated video for this, by a Brisbane-based artist called Helena Papageorgiou.

Any shows coming up?

Yes, but not right away.

What’s the rest of the year have in store?

We have a few more singles that we’ll be steadily releasing over the coming months. They’re part of a new EP coming out late this year. The new stuff feels like a real departure from everything else we’ve been doing up to this point, so I’m pretty excited about that. We’ll be touring the EP in Australia towards the end of the year, which I’m also super excited about. It’ll be both a homecoming tour and our first proper tour.

Where can we hear more of your music?

You can listen to our first two records on Bandcamp or Spotify, we're on YouTube, or whatever ya like.

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