Hatchie has returned with her new album Liquorice, out today.
With collaboration from producer Melina Duterte (aka Jay Som), the Brisbane-born shoegaze musician taps something honest, unrestrained, and wholly herself with Liquorice.
The album follows a period of re-assessment for Hatchie, during which she focused on her relationships with friends and family.
“This album feels like the culmination of everything I’ve wanted to do with this project since I first started it,” Hatchie said. “I focused on the finer details of the trajectory of love found and lost, inspired by my favourite tragic romance films. I’ve never felt more aligned with an album and can’t wait to share the experience with everyone.”
Rolling Stone AU/NZ caught up with Hatchie at BIGSOUND 2025 to chat about her album, relationships, touring, and more. Read the conversation below.
Hatchie’s Liquorice is out now via Secretly Canadian.
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Rolling Stone AU/NZ: You’re part of an exclusive group of Brisbane artists who are better known overseas than you are at home. That group includes the Saints and it includes the Go-Betweens and it includes Confidence Man.
Hatchie: I would agree.
I look at your touring schedule. You’ve got a deal with a US-based label, which is really cool. So congratulations on all of that. And we’re thrilled that you’re back at BIGSOUND.
Yeah, it’s good. I’m very, very happy to be back. I’m more comfortable and excited than I even think I anticipated I would be. So it’s nice, but even just staying with my parents for the week, not staying in a hotel… it’s very grounding, being around a very familiar environment, and people that I know really well. It’s a nice way to kind of reboot the live shows.
And homestyle cooking.
I mean, I think I just eat a lot of crap when I’m at my parents’ house — I had like a brownie at, like, 9am this morning.
Your music feels indebted to the early ’90s. It’s a time machine. There’s a bit of Cocteau Twins in there as well. You do it very well.
Thank you. I think what drew me to those [bands], same with the Sundays and Pale Saints and Chapterhouse, was I guess they all kind of have different sounds, but with those kind of shoegaze [bands], what fascinated me the most was how you could listen to their music and not know how they did it. Whether it was just through a bunch of layers, 20 layers of guitars, trying to get [a] wall of sound, or using 20 pedals or whatever it was, or using a vocal through a pedal as an instrument, that was what really drew me to those bands when I was growing up… I think I found it really fun and interesting and exciting to try and replicate those sounds.
So I think it’s interesting because now it’s like seven, eight years on since I started this project, and I think that there are so many people doing dream pop and shoegaze. It’s really exciting, but at that point in Brisbane, it didn’t feel like anyone else was really doing that combination of shoegaze and pop. And that was really exciting to me. And I just think it all happens through a bunch of experimentation, and the main thing for me when I started this project was merging all of my favourite sounds.
Having a dad involved in music, was he an influence?
Not directly. I think that definitely meant that I went to a bunch of different shows growing up. Like, obviously, I went to a million different gigs, so I think that definitely influenced my taste in music and my access to music. But I think it was more to do with just having a really open palette, I guess.
[A]lso having older siblings, the youngest of four, they were super influential on what I listened to growing up… so I had my brother listening to stuff that was really cool, like Radiohead when I was like 10 years old, but then I had my sisters who were pushing me to listen to Shania Twain… and my parents are really into Todd Rundgren and Carole King. I think it just all mixed together.
Where was Liquorice created?
[It] started in Melbourne and in Brisbane. So I moved from Brisbane to Melbourne when I was writing this album. I wrote some of it here, some of it in Melbourne, and then we took it to LA to finish it.
Is it problematic sometimes having your partner in your rock band? Is it all sweetness and light with having him in the band? (Hatchie’s partner, Joe Agius, is a member of her band.)
These days, yes, but it wasn’t always. It’s definitely been a really big, steep learning curve.
He’s talented?
Yeah, he’s great. I mean, he does all my visuals, he does all my artwork, and he plays in my band, and he co-writes with me, so he is the other half of the project. But there’s definitely been times when it’s kind of been like, “What is this? Is this a band? Is this a solo project? Like, where do we stand? How is this affecting our personal life?” There was a huge period where we were definitely prioritising the project over our relationship, and it was detrimental, and we had to really have a few big conversations about re-prioritising some things. I mean, we’ve been together for 12 years now, so [it’s] still early days in the grand scheme of things, but we’ve got it pretty figured out in terms of how we work with this project now.
Will you be supporting the record with another monumental international tour?
We’ve actually been kind of taking a different approach this time and not really booking that many shows far in advance. We’re giving people a chance to get to know the album first, as opposed to kind of pre-COVID times when we [would] book six months’ worth of shows before the album was even out. So I can’t really say that we’ve got much coming up. We’ve got another show coming up in Brisbane before the end of the year, and then we’re kind of just seeing how it goes. I think we’re going to do some touring in America, but still figuring it out.
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Which country really gets you? So with Confidence Man [it’s] the UK. We see it when they play Glastonbury. Do you get a sense of where the audiences really get you?
I don’t know. It’s hard to say… obviously it feels like we’re more popular in America because, I mean, we just straight up get asked to play shows more there. We get more show offers there. But I just think it’s a really different musical landscape. I think Australia’s a lot more of a festival industry, and my music doesn’t seem to really cut through festivals. It’s not really the right kind of genre, I guess. Whereas in America, we do a lot more support slots. I think there’s just more cities to play at now. I can’t really figure it out. I don’t know the answer to the question.
I think when we first started, we thought if it was going to pop off anywhere other than Australia, we thought it would be the UK. just by default because of the bands that were inspired by, but it was actually quite the opposite. So it’s been — I can’t predict it.
So what’s changed with you since the last record?
I think I’ve let go of the ego element, hopefully, a lot more this time around. Last time I was so concerned with what everyone thought of me and what I wanted to hear and what would do well, so that I could make it my job. Whereas this time around, I’m not thinking in that way, I’m not trying to grow, I’m not… the intentions are completely different.
I just did this album completely for myself, and I had a great time making it. I had a great time playing it on stage. Whereas last time I was like, “I want to play all these big shows and I want to do this, this and that.” And I held all these plans, and then some of them worked out well and some of them didn’t, and I just set myself up for disappoint.
