Brissie Punks Haters Break Down Their Debut Album 'Non-Violent'

With just a handful of years on the scene, Queensland power trio Haters have already made quite the impact. They’ve torn it up at gigs up and down the east coast, made a splash in the pond internationally with airplay on BBC Radio 1 and enlisted former Cancer Bats guitarist Scott Middleton to record their debut album. The result is Non-Violent, a punchy half-hour of power that sees the band tackle a wide array of subjects with a sound they cheerfully describe as “a joyous pastel-pink heart-shaped helium baloon full of razor blades and broken glass”.

With Non-Violent out in the world, lead vocalist and guitarist Jai Sparks has shared a series of insights into all 12 tracks on the album exclusively for Music Feeds.

1. ‘Liberate’

I wrote this song on a long train ride, after I’d helped my sister with her broken-down car. A couple of months prior I’d quit my job working for a major music company and realised for the past five or so years I’d basically lost touch of everything I enjoyed about music and had missed out on a lot of great records during that period. Music is really important to me so realising this was quite painful. I sat with my headphones on and bawled my eyes out for the couple of hours on the train. The line “I am not like you” is me yelling at myself, because I’d hated the person I’d become, and I was wanting to break out and liberate myself into someone I was proud of that I loved.

2. ‘Wander//Wonder’

I’d just had a decent stint in a psych hospital, l trying desperately to both survive and also get my life back in my hands. I felt like I’d been put on mute and the colours and brightness turned down in there in order to save me, and that my life and my body was waiting for me outside in the non-hospital world. In my first few weeks back into home care, I found that there was someone else that seemed to of taken up home inside of my head – and that person was the sick person. The other me was still stuck outside. I still feel like this at times when I have a severe episode. I remember thinking in hospital, “I wonder how I got into this fucking mess” and jotted it down in a little book.

3. ‘Quit My Job’

Like a lot of my writing, the lyrics are very direct and not trying to hide anything in the poetry of it all. ‘Quit My Job’ is basically about the joy of a new start, and the chorus is just yelling and screaming because I just wanted to make noise and I didn’t care why or what it was about. I just wanted to be loud and me. It celebrates the ownership over actual haters, and how I firmly believe loving the way someone hates you can dismantle that hate and give you the power back.

4. ‘Dead Inside My Head’

This song is a rollercoaster of feelings and life. The core of the song revolves around the idea of falling into the trap of moving into a life you don’t like – because, as a society, we’ve created a concept that to be perceived as an adult, we are required to give up on most things we enjoy and fulfill us. A lot of people, including friends, end up going through the world on autopilot and somewhat braindead. It speaks to the pressure to be that person, while also talking about the unusual things you do living with a mental illness – like painting your bedroom, or selling your things to get out of debt but then compulsively spending that money on new shit. I made a decision when I turned 21 that I would commit to creating music for the rest of my life, regardless of the financial success I might have with it. That’s where the line “I think I’ve been my favourite bridge to burn down” came from; sort of like a “there’s no turning back’ moment, and I’ve willingly accepted and chosen that.

5. ‘Ted Bundy’

If you can’t tell, I’m dedicated to writing literally with the edges left on. I wanted to write a song about a day in my life, or the life of someone living with bipolar disorder during a severe episode. The verses are just that – I want people to know what it feels like as best as words can convey that. I do, however, live in a space of humour in my outside life to try and manage. I saw Zac Efron had been cast as Ted Bundy, and I remarked: “I can’t even be as sexy as a serial killer”. We laughed about how they had cast arguably the hottest man in the world at that moment in this role. I enjoyed the contrast to the verses and how it makes me feel.

6. ‘Steal A Car’

‘Steal A Car’ is about the feeling you have when you spend time with someone you have lost in a dream. One of my friends had overdosed, and about six months later I had this beautiful vivid dream about stealing a car together and smashing it at the Coorparoo skate park in Brisbane. We set it alight, and then we ran from the cops laughing for what seemed like forever. I love this song so much, and how it makes people feel. We played a show in Niagara Falls, and a woman in her mid-40s jumped on stage during the set right after the song, hugged me and said that song could be about her. It’s probably one of the most significant things I’ve experienced playing music live ever.

7. ‘Young Ones’

I wanted to sing about the innocence of youth, and the moment you have as a tween/teen where – for the most part – everyone is still having a tonne of fun, even if life was a bit fucked up. How foreign it would be, to know all these painful and irreversible things were going to happen in just a few years. It was important to me to talk about how people can be unkind, or in some cases unhinged, but it still hurts in such an intense way when you lose them to suicide or in a way sometimes mentally to drug abuse or overdose. I think everyone can relate in some way to the line “All the young ones/Where did you go?”

8. ‘Weapon’

it’s a really simple song about the potential all men have to be violent towards women, and uses the analogy that a gun without bullets is still a gun and only requires bullets to be life-threatening. It also talks directly about my loathing towards praise of men who are basically treating women with the base level of respect. The way I see it – and I know it’s much more complex than this – but if you see a car stop at a red light, you don’t say thanks for doing so. It’s understood you don’t run people over.

9. ‘Last Night’

I love this song, because verse one tells the story of a past life that is unhealthy and filled with relationships that were fairly toxic. Verse two, meanwhile, dives straight into the complete opposite whilst all centred around a day and a night out and the contrasting memory the different times have created. I was so excited when the outro came to me: “I loved you/I used to hate me/Now I love me/And I hate you”. It felt like the perfect summary, and then to finish on just a line of self-love getting more and more aggressive – “I love me” – just really emphasised how I felt at the time of writing the song.

10. ‘Jimmy Says’

One day when we started the band, Jimmy [AKA drummer James Priest] said I was kind of strange – in a beautiful and caring way – after I was telling him a story. Although I don’t feel unique in this experience, I feel that I’ve attracted a lot of challenging situations throughout my life – whether it be pulling a stranger from his car and holding him in my arms while he had a heart attack and died, to pulling a friend naked and unconscious from a deep creek next to my house in the pitch-black night. Life is wild, and it really helped me to talk about some of this stuff through music. It’s not a poor-me story – none of it is. It’s just experiences.

11. ‘My Best Friend’

NOTE: This parargraph contains references to domestic violence and assault.

I don’t agree or subscribe to the idea that we should mute or soften things that provide discomfort. It should be hard to hear, and it should make you feel confronting and painful feelings. I was at a party with my friends sitting with a group of seven women, discussing male violence towards women. All seven of them openly discussed that they slept with a weapon under the bed, or under their pillow, or in their drawers. I wasn’t surprised as much as I was just deeply sad. A few months passed, and someone in that group reached out to me; her house had been broken into while she was asleep. She awoke to being assaulted in her bed by an ex-partner who she had long forgotten. It was life-altering and devastating. The police said that the stress caused to her to prosecute someone is high, and they advise to let it go to save herself the trouble. I am, and I hope you are also, crying reading this. This is the world; this is common, this isn’t isolated. I was encouraged and given full permission to write, record and release this song. What a fucking horrible mess.

12. ‘Survive Twice’

The song kicks off driving down an empty highway in the middle of the night with my eyes closed, trying to find a way through things. Although it starts in a dark place, it’s actually a song about love, friendship and happiness. The line “Try to survive twice” is talking about how two people who are struggling to stay on earth can accidentally run into each other – and, in the process, the act of being in each other’s lives can result in two people surviving. Verse one is about becoming friends with Kaito [AKA bassist Kaitlyn Hold], and how profound that has been while being terrified initially to let somebody, in while verse two is about my wife and the idea of going through it together. Put it this way: we have been together and unwaveringly in love for more years in our lives than we haven’t.

Non-Violent is out now via FOUR|FOUR. You can stream, download and purchase the album – as well as ticket to the band’s upcoming national tour – by clicking here.