Time and Place: The Preatures Find A Reflective New Space on 'Girlhood'

We have our own personal waypoints. Musicians have them too, but many of theirs also populate vinyl racks and streaming services. When the Preatures look back on their new LP, ‘Girlhood’, they’ll see their studio space in Surry Hills, Sydney. They’ll remember a night spent on a balcony with friends prior to playing a big festival set. They’ll watch their younger selves navigate the yawning space that follows a breakthrough release.

Isabella Manfredi will also see something else in the distance. While ‘Girlhood’ is a document of who the Preatures are right now, it’s also an effort by the vocalist to better understand her youth and the woman she became. It’s a missive from two times concurrently. “Yeah, I tear myself apart for kicks for you,” she sings on the title track. “Whatever makes me a modern girl.”

“You don’t really think about what you’re doing when you’re making a record. You’re just doing it,” she says. “It’s the making it that makes it a postcard. Music is a physical thing, it’s not an intellectual pursuit for me. It’s actually my respite from intellectualism.

“Even when you have those hang ups and things about the record that piss you off - a bad memory, or it might be tortuous making a certain song or a great experience making another - when you look back on it as a whole, having that perspective is nice. You go: ‘Oh yeah, that’s what we were.’”

The band’s debut, ‘Blue Planet Eyes’, was a rambunctious success on its release in 2014, with the help of its eye-catching lead single, Is This How You Feel?. Recorded in the States with Spoon drummer Jim Eno, it sounds like an album by a band learning how things work while music industry detritus is whipped up in a storm around them. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald's Peter Munro, guitarist Jack Moffitt described it as “lacking in a certain amount of perspective”.

With Moffitt stepping up from co-producer on album one to solely helming album two at the Doldrums, the band's studio sanctuary, ‘Girlhood’ has a different energy entirely. Musically it’s warm and considered - somewhere between Paisley Underground and Fleetwood Mac - while Manfredi’s lyrics suggest that they’ve squirreled away a healthy stock of perspective. “It doesn’t have an outward energy to me, this record,” she says. “It has a very introspective mood.”

Much of that comes from the decision to head home. With writing and recording stretching to a year and half following the exit of guitarist Gideon Bensen and an injury to drummer Luke Davison, the band had to let things simmer once they were back in Sydney. Manfredi took the opportunity to do the ‘normal’ stuff that musicians simply don’t have the chance to once the gears of the touring machine start working.

“There’s this great tradition of songwriting in Sydney about the city itself and living in the point of first contact, or the first settlement in Australia,” Manfredi says. “It’s the most beautiful city, but it lingers with this feeling of lost opportunities. That seeped into our songwriting."

“We could have done it another way but being at home allowed me space and time," she adds. "Especially to work on the lyrics. I went away and rewrote a lot of stuff, refined it. I spent a lot of time just doing small things at home, pottering in the garden, cooking. That was really nice. I feel like we came out with a record that’s more reflective because that’s what I was doing with my day-to-day.”

‘Girlhood’ certainly benefits from that extended period of downtime. It’s not a record that’s hemmed in by preconceived goals or clock-watching. Manfredi’s discussions of bullying, anxiety and feminism are articulate and powerful, while her analytical eye also takes in the safety net provided by her bandmates and the nature of fandom on two of the LP’s luxurious ballads: Magick and Your Fan.

It’s a third, though, that gets closest to distilling Manfredi’s work here. Cherry Ripe finds her looking closely at her younger self and a time when she sought to become “one of the boys”. It speaks of her feeling out of step: bullied at school and seeing teenage mistakes stack up next to the remnants of her parents’ divorce. “Put you on a stage now they know your name,” she sings. “But you used to be different, baby, back in the day.”

“I was diagnosed when I was 18 with acute dissociative anxiety,” Manfredi says. “It basically means that you’re outside yourself, you’re looking at yourself doing these things but you’re not actually connected to it. You’re not living it, really. Presently or physically with an idea of action or consequence. That song was about me singing the character of my out of body experience. As if that self was an older, wiser woman singing back to that girl.”

The stylistic choices made by the band, and Moffitt as producer, serve as the bow around Manfredi’s words. ‘Girlhood’ feels lived in and welcoming. It’s almost a capsule from a time when the sleek, faultlessly tasteful excesses of '80s pop-rock were the only musical currency around. Which is ironic, because Manfredi grew up hating that stuff.

“I hated it,” she laughs. “It’s quite funny that it’s what happened naturally in our band. We tend to gravitate towards those sounds, but there’s a lot of country in there too. We started as a band really singing a lot of alt-Americana and stuff like Gram Parsons, or even the White Stripes, Ryan Adams, Emmylou Harris. I’ve always loved country music. It’s not cool, but it’s present in so much of modern songwriting.

“The other thing about this record is that, even though some of the themes are about a dark turn of mind or things that were difficult for me to put on record, I always feel like there’s got to be something hopeful in music. It’s really important to remember that you’re singing for the bigger spirit. I’ve always tried to do that, channel things that are difficult for me into something that’s inspiring.”

‘Girlhood’ is out now on Virgin EMI.

The Preatures Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:

Tue October 10 2017 - LONDON Moth Club

Click here to compare & buy The Preatures Tickets at Stereoboard.com.

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