Can everyone introduce themselves for the record? Tell me your name and what you do in Swapmeet!
Maxwell: My name’s Maxwell, I play guitar and drums.
Venus: –and sing!
M: And sing sometimes.
Jack: My name is Jack and I play guitar and drums and I sing as well. The same as Maxwell!
V: My name is Venus and I play guitar and sing.
M: We’re also missing Josh who plays bass.
Josh is here in spirit!... Can you start off by telling me a little bit about how Swapmeet came to be? How did everyone meet, how did you first get into music?
M: Do you want me to do it?
J: Yeah! Go ahead, go ahead.
M: Alright, so me and Josh, the bassist, we met in high school. We played in a band together and then we met Venus because Venus took photos for that band that doesn’t really exist anymore.
V: While we were in high school–
M: Yeah, was it year twelve?
V: Yes, twelve I think!
M: We all became really good friends and started hanging out and then [Jack and Venus] met?
J: Venus and I met at an end of year party and then we went to someone’s house and we were just playing guitar and then Venus was like “you have to come play music with us!”
V: There’s a video. There’s a very drunk video where I’m filming Jack playing guitar ‘cause I think it’s so awesome and I’m drunkenly saying “Oh my god you’ve got to come and have a jam with us!” But then it actually happened! And we were asked–one of my other bands was gonna play a gig and then we broke up. I was like, we could play, I don’t know if we’re ready but we could play the gig and we just decided to do it. And then we just kept on playing after that.
J: Yeah we got offered a bunch of gigs after our first gig that we made the set for in a week.
When did you start playing all of your instruments?
V: I started pretty late. I started playing guitar when I was maybe sixteen.
J: I started so young. I was like five years old when I started playing guitar. And then, I learned drums once and then I forgot how to play drums for a while, and then I remembered how to play drums.
M: I started playing guitar when I was like six and then I started playing drums when Swapmeet started.
I want to talk about your first EP, Oxalis. What I find really interesting about the sound is how much it shifts in style from one song to the next while still remaining very cohesive. What was the writing process like for all the songs and how did you record it? Do you record yourselves?
J: We wrote a lot of the songs during the first couple of years being a band. We messed around with the recording a lot and things weren’t really working for a while. Then we put out [New Wood, Old Ashes] which was really just a demo I’d made of that song that everyone agreed was a good enough recording of the song to just put it out anyways. Then from there it was like, okay, how do we record the songs that we all wrote together in a really nice way that’s going to work? So, we cut back from a few songs that we didn't really think fit together with everything. I think Ceiling Fan was one of the first songs that we ever wrote together, which is epic and so funny. Then a couple of the songs were written more around the time of recording like Collision and Lucky. And yeah! We recorded it ourselves which was really fun. In the room right behind me, actually. Well, most of it. Some of it was also at Maxwell’s.
So every aspect is really collaborative?–
M: Yeah! We’ll all write individually and then we’ll bring little bits into practice and make something from there!
V: I feel like Ceiling Fan is the best OG example of how we write songs.
M: Definitely.
V: I’d written just a little part of a song and then he started going like [exclamatory noise] and then Jack came and got on guitar and started going blah blah blah blah blah and it was so awesome and I remember thinking “Holy crap! This is so sick!” We all write songs but then when we work on it together it becomes something else entirely which is cool.
J: I think it was just such a challenge to capture all of our creative energy for some reason, and it has been for a while which is probably why it took so long.
I was looking at your playlist on Spotify of songs you like, and I saw that a lot of them are American bands. But are there any local Adelaide or Australian bands who influence your sound? Could you tell me more about what the scene is like in Australia?
V: Armlock!!
M: I was going to say the same thing. A lot of local stuff influences us as well. Like all of our friends that are in bands, we all kind of like what they’re doing and we feed off of each other a little bit, which is nice. The scene’s really cool, at least in Adelaide which we know a bit about. We haven’t been too much interstate–well, Venus you've been interstate a bit, so you know more than us.
V: I think it really is a post-COVID music scene. I wouldn't say we were too influenced by bands before COVID locally with our music that we made. They inspired us to be on stage, but I think through COVID, we all listened to music that was being made in different countries, especially the US. This scene we have now is just post-COVID babies that are influenced not from just the same circle. It allowed us to break out of it and introduce something a little bit different. Does that make sense? [laughs]
Yeah, yeah it does!
V: Any other specific bands?
J: Jackulson!
V: Jackulson’s awesome.
I hear a lot in your music, especially in “I Wish I,” that kind of reminds me of Wednesday, like the yelling in “Bull Believer.” I thought that was really awesome.
V: When Bull Believer came out, I was like, “No! What?” We had been playing that for so long. I was like “they did it, they did the thing! Oh my god we need to make it sound like this. This sounds awesome.” They managed to encapsulate the exact energy that I felt with that song. So that turned out to actually be a really good example of how we can make all of the noise work.
J: We bought Bull Believer on bandcamp just so we could analyze the mix!
Going back to Oxalis, I forgot to ask, I was looking at the cover and trying to figure out what the art was, and then I realized that everything you've done has either a dog or animal theme. And also oxalis is a plant genus! I was wondering how nature influences your songwriting and also your art.
V: We live in Belair which is in the foothills of Adelaide, so we’re constantly surrounded by nature. We felt like animals were also a good way to separate ourselves from the music. Instead of having us on the front covers and stuff, the music isn’t really about us anymore once we’ve written it. Using the animals as these kinds of figures that we can put the music to, it’s a good representation of everything we try and make.
M: I agree with everything you said. It’s kind of cool especially having the animals on the artwork so far from us, it helps detach us from the music a little bit. It’s more focused on what people are hearing instead of us being at the center of it.
V: And they’re cute! They’re cute as hell.
Venus, do you make the artwork?
V: Yeah! Most of it. I’m just like an iPad baby so I’m always just making stuff.
What are you guys working on now? What’s up next for Swapmeet?
V: Okay on three! One…two…three!
Everyone: Album!
What can you tell me about this album?
V: Not much [laughs].
J: We’ve still yet to figure it out.
V: But there is one in the works! I mean we’ve got a million songs. We literally have a million thousand songs. We’re just trying to figure out what’s going to go on the album and start recording it.
J: We’re going around Australia a bit as well.
M: Yeah, a few shows!
Hopefully America one day!
M: We’ve got some friends that are there at the moment and it looks like so much fun.
V: Yeah! They’re called Doris, if they play near you, they’re really good. It was very hard for them to get into America to play so they did it their own D.I.Y. way which sounds really, really hard. It just seems really hard to go play in America but hopefully we can do it at some point!
