Hatchie is, without a doubt, the only musician who has opened for both Kylie Minogue and Alex G. Harriette Pilbeam’s tender-hearted dream pop takes as much influence from the jangly alternative rock and shoegaze of her ‘90s youth as it does from stadium-sized synthpop, stamping her anthems of yearning and hopeless romanticism with a timeless flair. Her new single “Lose It Again” is one of the most sincerely infectious songs of the year, unabashedly reveling in the thrills of young love: “all the nights we stayed up stealing all the hours tomorrow had to give / all I ever wanted was a chance to give you everything, but everything could never be enough.”

Liquorice, the upcoming third Hatchie album, is her most smitten yet. Like all of her material, it was written and produced alongside her husband Joe Agius, who also performs solo under the name Rinse. It’s a bit more threadbare and heart-strung than her last album, 2022’s Giving the World Away – lush, heart-pounding synthwork is traded in for a more serene, idyllic collection of treacly songs of love and devotion. It’s her first project that sees her smiling on the cover, seemingly beaming in the aftermath of a lipstick-laden kiss.

Northern Transmissions caught up with Pilbeam and Agius over Zoom in the weeks before the release of Liquorice to talk about finding inspiration in romance flicks, how they turn fervor into dreamy goodness, and the pair’s approach to creative synergy.

NT: The new album Liquorice was written and conceptualized back in Australia, after returning from a pretty lengthy stint in Los Angeles for both of you. How did coming home after a while invigorate this record?

Harriette Pilbeam: It definitely felt weird coming home after a long time of touring. I think it meant that we got to take a lot of time to reflect and really feel like we were restarting things.

Joe Agius: I think the key with this one was not to rush it and take the time for Harriette to create something that she’s really proud of. Most of the past releases there’s [been] a deadline that we’re trying to finish stuff towards, but this time we just absolutely had no plan or idea of when we wanted things to wrap up.

HP: Yeah, we really wanted to feel like it was our own and like we’d worked on it from the ground up mostly by ourselves until it got to that point where we took it to the producer. Last time it was a lot of back and forth with writing sessions and working with other producers from the get-go.

NT: To me, this feels like the most uncomplicated and uncompromised Hatchie album yet. The last album, Giving the World Away, felt so expansive and opulent and dramatic, even – this one is deeply intimate and feels very home-spun. Did the reception or general scale of GTWA drive you in a certain direction for this album?

HP: Definitely. I think when we set out to write [Giving the World Away], we wanted it to sound as big and polished as possible – we wanted to dream, just kind of shoot for the stars. Then when we tried to tour it, we realized that it was actually really complicated to try and tour that album and pull it off live. It made things a lot harder than we thought it would, so this time around we definitely had that in mind. We wanted songs that were a lot easier to play live and made more sense in that setting.

JA: I think at the end of the day, it’s a return to home. Similar to the first EP, I think it’s what’s most natural for Harriette to write. We didn’t want to change things too much from her original demos, whereas on the last record we really expanded on the demos and the ideas – [we] took guitars out and put more synths in, and all that kind of stuff. This time, the whole point was that less is more, really.

NT: You’ve talked about how the more romantic themes of the album were less inspired by other music, and more influenced by literature and film. What did you find in those works of art that were eventually channeled into Liquorice?

HP: I think the main thing for me was realizing that there’s a million different ways that you can tell a story. It might feel like you’ve covered all the bases already, but then I would watch a movie – for example, Blue Valentine, that movie with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams is basically a divorce drama, but there’s so many layers to it. I think that watching those films helped me realize that you can tell the same story a hundred different ways, and it never stops being interesting. It kind of helped encourage me to revisit some of the concepts that I felt like I had maybe finished with, and realize that there was a lot more that could be said about them.

NT: Do either of you have an all-time favorite romance film or novel?

HP: I love Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Splendor in the Grass, which [are] two ‘60s movies. I loved Portrait of a Lady on Fire, [which] I really fell in love with while I was making this album, that was a big one for me. Anything that’s really devastating, I think, because that feels the most effective and realistic.

JA: I would probably say Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. That book’s interesting because it’s like a love story, but without spoiling anything it’s not really that much of a happy ending. It’s like a friendship love, and I like how it talks about it being just as important as a romantic love, which is cool.

NT: The way that you write love songs is really satisfying to me, they’re always hallmarked by these larger-than-life feelings of yearning and adoration. How do you find yourself translating those big, raw feelings into something tuneful and pretty?

HP: Whether it’s to do with romance or life in general, I’m always somebody who’s hoping for more and wanting more and yearning and longing, and that’s just something that’s kind of integral to the way that both of us function. I think that translates well into romantic music, it’s just something kind of natural to me and I find it the most interesting way to write music. It’s just an emotion that’s really prevalent in my life, so regardless of what’s going on in my love life, I find myself falling back into those habits with writing. I’ve always loved a love song that sounds really pretty and warm, and then when you actually listen to the lyrics it’s a lot darker than you initially thought. I think that’s what’s so enticing about a lot of our favorite artists, like The Sundays.

JA: I think that’s the common thread for most things we listen to happy music, sad lyrics.

NT: I want to talk about “Lose It Again”, because that song is just so gorgeous to me – it’s so unapologetically lovestruck and earnestly gooey. Did that track just scream “lead single material” when putting together the album? HP: Originally I didn’t think of it that way, did you?

JA: No, it’s funny because I think when we recorded it, I know I definitely felt like it wasn’t the kind of direction I expected the record to go. But then when Harriette finished writing the record, that one made so much more sense. From there, I kind of was able to re-look at it in a different kind of light and was like “oh, this is definitely a single.”

HP: Yeah, finishing the album gave us perspective on that song. When we first started, it was more like an exercise, we were just like “oh, let’s write a song, sure.”

JA: It was kind of one of the first songs we did after Giving the World Away, so it felt miles away from that record. It didn’t feel like it was something we were gonna use for the next record, but the nature of the new record being very guitar-y and stuff like that, it just made a lot more sense. It seems to be kind of the common favorite whenever we show anyone.

HP: You know, what you said about it being earnest and gooey, honestly when we were writing it, [it was] something that I was really not sure about. I was like, “I don’t know, this is pretty on-the-nose.” So I think that kind of made me push it away at first, and I tried to change the lyrics to be something a bit deeper, because I thought that would make it easier to respect or something. But then I was like, no, sometimes just putting all your cards on the table is the most impressive thing that you can do. I’m glad, because Jeremy [McLennan, of Orchin] really pushed it in that direction lyrically, and I think it ended up being perfect for the song.

NT: Are there any deep cuts on the record that you hope can get some shine once it comes out?

JA: I think “Stuck” for me.

HP: Mmm, I think “Stuck” is a good one, that’s partly why I made it the last track, to give it kind of its moment. I really like the song “Liquorice”.

JA: “Carousel” seems to be one that a lot of our friends [like], even in LA with Melina [Duterte], it was her favorite as well.

HP: I think that’s an underdog, “Carousel” we’ve probably worked on the most together as well, so that one feels very special to us for that reason – thinking about the whole process it went through.

NT: I was going to ask – the album was produced alongside Melina Duterte, also known as Jay Som. What was it like to work behind the boards with her, someone who’s better known for her solo work than her production work?

HP: It was really fun! It was honestly so chill and casual, even more so than I expected.

JA: We just kind of finished things off together and did the drums with Stella [Mozgawa] from Warpaint and tidied a bunch of things up. It was nice, really relaxing way of doing things. Everything was really there, so it wasn’t a stressful “oh shit, what do we do to make this song better?” It was good in a way for us to go through all the songs with someone before kind of locking them in, because it assured us that the album felt really good and was ready and everything.

HP: Yeah, we kind of just re-tracked all the guitars and drums, and only one song really sounded very different from how it did when we went in, which was “Someone Else’s News”. That was a real group effort, and Joe really re-doing all the guitars on that one. Other than that, it was pretty chill, it was kind of just pushing everything over the line production-wise.

NT: This is the third Hatchie album that the two of you have worked on together. How do you feel like your approach to collaboration has changed over the course of the discography so far? Have you seen different sides of one another emerge with each new record? HP: I think that our communication’s a lot better now.

JA: Yeah, I think that compared to the first record, we’re so much more self-sufficient now. We really needed a lot of help from John Castle, who produced it, compared to now – where we’ve built up a little home studio and we’re able to just kind of record and write everything ourselves. Definitely thinking about it that way, we’ve grown a lot. I guess we’re just most comfortable writing music with each other at this stage.

HP: I feel like we really went out and wrote with a lot of different people last time, and we didn’t really have any negative experiences but we always just end up back to writing with one another. We have a shorthand, and we like 99% of the same things and our influences are all the same. It’s cool, [it] just makes life a lot easier, everything runs so smoothly together. I feel Like we fill in each other’s gaps as well, with instruments and ideas. I can do bass, Joe can do guitars. Joe’s better at lyrics than me and I’m more of a melody person – so we kind of work together in that way.

Liquorice is out via Secretly Canadian on November 7. Pre-order HERE