Hatchie – “Bad Guy”
After playing in local Aussie bands like Babaganouj and Go Violet for years, Brisbane musician Harriette Pillbeam started making sweet, sparkling, ’90s-indebted dream-pop on her own under the name Hatchie, a childhood nickname. We named her an Artist To Watch on the strength of recent singles “Sugar & Spice” and “Sleep,” both of which cracked our 5 Best Songs Of The Week lists when they came out. And now her whole debut EP, also titled Sugar & Spice, is finally out.
With those aforementioned singles already out in the world along with her 2017 tracks “Try” and “Sure,” the only song on the EP that we haven’t heard yet is “Bad Guy,” the four-and-a-half-minute closer. In other words, it’s the comedown from the sugar rush, heavier on the “dream” than the “pop” side of the equation compared to the rest of the collection. But it’s still a stunner, full of the kind of immediate earworm melodies that you can’t believe you haven’t heard before.
“The ‘Bad Guy’ part is something that I actually thought of and had actually written down about having the same fight with someone over and over again,” Pillbeam told us in a recent interview. “And you are constantly looking for someone to blame and it doesn’t matter who the bad guy is in this situation, we need to fix it. It turned into a song almost about a breakup and that’s not what ended up happening with that situation. We solved the problem in real life, but it made more sense for the song for it to be a bit open-ended.” Listen and revisit the rest of the EP below.
Sugar & Spice is out now on Double Double Whammy.