Cover Story: IT’S STATING THE BLEEDING OBVIOUS, BUT DESPITE WHAT COULD BE CONSTRUED AS AN AMBIGUOUS TITLE, KILLING HEIDI’S NEW ALBUM PRESENT IS A REPRESENTATION OF WHERE THEY ARE AT THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT, IE THE PRESENT. “THIS IS A REFLECTION OF WHAT WE’VE BEEN THROUGH AND WHO WE ARE NOW. IT’S A LITTLE BIT TIED IN WITH REFLECTOR AS WELL, BECAUSE THAT WAS ABOUT TAKING IN EXPERIENCE AND PUTTING IT OUT AS MUSICAL INSPIRATION, BUT PRESENT IS THE UPDATE AND THE HERE AND NOW,” SAYS KILLING HEIDI’S VOCALIST ELLA HOOPER.
THE HERE AND NOW - KILLING HEIDI story by MARK NEILSEN

Getting Present to the present was a dif-ficult process.“Whatever plan we did have got thrown to the bloody winds. We hit so many roadblocks with the making of it. The initial creation of it was so easy and flowing with Jess and I.The songs just came and we were like,‘Yes!’ but it was after that in the recording and the producing and the mixing of it that took a long time and was a bit of a drawn out process that got a bit painful towards the end,” Ella says.

“I guess where we come back to is having lis-tened to it finally completed is it was worth the time, even though we would have pre-ferred to have it out a little bit earlier and obviously have it finished earlier, whether it was released then or not,” adds Killing Heidi guitarist Jesse Hopper.“For us we’re satisfied with it, we’re happy with how it sounds, so hopefully that will transfer into everyone else who felt similarly about the first one, because it gives you a bit of confidence to think hope-fully we’ll still get the same good response.”

One of the roadblocks in making Present was Ella having surgery to remove a cyst from her throat. Obviously for a singer this is not an ideal situation.The experience of it manifests itself on the album with the song The Days. The rawness and rage in the vocals of this track is something never heard on a Killing Heidi song before, especially towards the end where Ella screams the lyrics like it’s the last time she’ll ever sing. Hooper recalls that vocals for The Days were recorded the night before she had the operation.

“I was doing some recording and I only decided I was going to have [surgery] that day. It was all very bam, bam, bam, and I was like may as well give it one last go. I was so tense and angry. It was a horrible time. I was just so stressed out by the whole thing. I thought it’s a really good relief. It felt really good just to go ‘waaaaaah’,” she vents, giving a suppressed version of a rock scream.

This difficult recording process is in contrast to the actual songwriting, which as Ella men-tioned before normally comes pretty easy for the siblings, and even did when they were writing for previous album Reflector.“But I think with Reflector we didn’t have a good scope,” Jesse remarks.“What we wrote we liked, and we didn’t know anyone else liked it until it had been released and had success. I think we’ve probably got a little bit more con-fidence with our songwriting skills because we know now that we can write songs that people like. Usually you’re writing a batch of songs and you like them, and your family and friends might like them, but there’s no way of gauging a big response to it until you get the response. This time we’ve had the opportunity to see what people like of ours and it’s not like we’re just trying to replicate what works for us, because a lot of the stuff is quite different, but we feel if we like it in the same way we like those songs, it will have a carry on effect.”

Ella: “We don’t want to isolate anyone who liked Reflector because it’s definitely still the same band, still the same sound to a degree, but it’s a totally different album, and it’s a dif-ferent emotion and different base, so I hope that they can walk across that little bridge.”

It looks like Killing Heidi is helping the listener to take baby steps across that bridge with the release of the first two singles off the album, Heavensent and Outside of Me. They sound most like previous album Reflector but the rest of Present is a diverse affair, all within the Killing Heidi framework of course. Other tracks like the rocking Pave The Way are a little remi-niscent of Reflector but then there are others such as the swinging Sweet and the tender acoustic number 12345, while Damage Control even has a hint of rapping in there from (temporary) MC Ella.

This diverseness in the record is something the band didn’t really notice until the middle of production on the album as most of the songs were written on acoustic guitar.“So you could really take them a different way than a lot of them went,” Jesse says.“But once we started jamming them up with the boys, which was probably the biggest difference in the process this time, the involvement of Adam [Pedretti, drums] and Warren [Jenkin, bass] with us in the arrangements and devel-opment of songs, it just drew upon our three years together, which has been loud and heavy and having fun rocking out, which real-ly was the big influence on where the songs went, except for a couple of them obviously.”

Ella: “They just wanted to be their own little creatures.”

Jesse: “They took off in the way we played them, when we jammed up from the acoustic stage to the rock stage. And of course again they changed a little bit when you hit the stu-dio, but that’s because you’re not playing live and you can layer stuff.”

The consensus from the Hoopers is that work-ing the songs up with the rhythm section was a positive process, and sometimes the input of “the boys”, as Pedretti and Jenkin are known, changed Ella and Jesse’s vision of how a song would turn out.“That’s the beauti-ful thing, especially as they have such diverse skills,” Jesse enthuses.“Adam comes from N.I.L, which was a metal band, so when he hears a riff for the first time, his response is usually a technical...”

Double kick?

Jesse: “Double kick beat, or something quite different from what I listen to, which is great because it makes me think that’s cool. I’ve written a cool riff and Adam’s lifted it. And Warren similarly, his skills as quite a technical bass player, he can bring quite an eclectic feel to a riff where I would have been a straight bass player.”

The Hoopers were only in their teens when recording Reflector. Now with the experiences that accompany an increase in age (although Ella is still in her teens - just, and not for much longer - at 19) comes more con-fidence in their songwriting abilities, previously untested at the time of Reflector but now stronger after playing and presenting their songs to a wider audience.

Ella: “These days I’ll be like yeah, give that a go. I’m more confidant with my hunches or my ideas vocally or even musically. It kind of reflects over everything really. When you grow up you become more of your own person and our influences are probably not as loud, like they’re becoming more subtle, I think.This time around it’s even more Killing Heidi, it feels like it’s coming from us. Our influences are not as obvi-ous. You hear some bands and on their first album you go,‘Oh I know exactly who they’re into’, and on this one it’s like it’s really diverse.”

Do you think now you have a firmer idea of what you want Killing Heidi to be?

Jesse: “That’s a hard one because we’re always changing. Maybe that’s what we want to be. Maybe we want to be something that can keep evolving without being stuck in a box so to speak.”

Ella: “I really can’t project where it might go. I used to think we’d probably go down the heavy route, but especially with all the troubles with my voice, I love it so much but I’ve discov-ered a whole other side of our songs, a softer side, a more subtle, kind of acoustic side, and I think it’s always going to have a touch of both. It will have to. I mean we love both, so we have to be entertained by what we’re doing too. So it will probably always be pretty diverse.”

Present is out through Wah Wah/Sony. Killing Heidi will play acoustically at Homebake December 7 in the Domain and are also looking to have their own tour towards the end of the year.