Melbourne’s House Vs. Hurricane have become one of Australia’s most successful musical exports. Since their inception with 2008’s Forfeiture, the band was one of the first in Australia to mix metal with synth overtures successfully, many had done it before but few managed to stick around. That was of course followed by Perspectives, the band’s first full-length, though after buckling down, the band is once again looking to steal the limelight in not just the Australian scene, but also the international scene. Crooked Teeth, the 3rd full-length is out now and we caught up with guitarist and vocalist Ryan McLerie to shoot the shit.
So as a fan, having to wait almost 2 years since their last release, I was dying to know about the new album, Ryan was of course more than happy to explain it: “It’s basically a trim-the-fat version of House Vs. Hurricane; it’s very different, a lot more aggressive and more to the point compared to our other stuff. There’s very little synth. It’s pretty different, but a lot more attention was put on making the songs memorable, that was the criteria for writing.”
As Ryan explains, the band had more direction when recording Crooked Teeth than they have exercised with previous releases: “We kind of sat down and talked about how we wanted the song to be, we wanted to do a lot more faster stuff. When you’re writing it, it sounds unnatural but you really need to think about what type of sound you want the songs to have and write in that direction to get that result. We had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted it to sound like.”
It sounded like this was uncharted water for the Post-hardcore heroes; how did it affect the process? “It took ages man. We only really finished writing the record like 6 months before we recorded. We hadn’t written anything after Perspectives; we couldn’t find a direction we were all stoked on.”
Given that the band had put so much thought into the album prior to entering the studio, it sounded as though there was a lot of unity within the camp, and even working for the first time with new vocalist Dan Casey, HVH remained a united front. I asked how this was possible given the new addition to the team: “It was awesome working with Dan, we’ve known him for years. It wasn’t like it was someone brand new that we didn’t know, it was a good friend we’ve had for ages. It was easy. He’s got his head screwed on, probably the easiest recording experience we’ve had.”
The band had the opportunity to road test both Dan and the new material at Loud Fest in Sydney. As Ryan tells it, they opened with Blood Knuckles, the first single off the release: “It starts with singing, and like the whole crowd was singing along to it, that was insane, we hadn’t put anything out for so long, we hadn’t played in so long. The single had only been put out a couple of nights before and people were full singing along to it.”
The current tour also has a list of regional dates you’ll get short of breath just looking at. Playing the regional shows has become something very important for the band who understand that “it’s pretty hard, and pretty expensive for some of those kids to come to our shows, so it’s important to us to keep them involved, so we decided to go to them.”
Now with Crooked Teeth at stores and on iTunes and the national and regional tour well on its way, the band has also released an iPod application for the diehards and were included on the bill for Big Day Out 2013, representing Australian metal. House Vs. Hurricane are definitely the hurricane in the equation, having built up serious momentum, everything that gets in their way is going to be simply ripped to shreds.
