Growing Up, Crushing Hard And Coldplay: Japanese Wallpaper Talks Us Through His Debut Album
Japanese Wallpaper gives us the track-by-track breakdown and unlikely influences on 'Glow', out today.
Japanese Wallpaper has a lot riding on Glow: since winning triple j’s Unearthed High in 2014, Gab Strum has remained one of Australia’s ones-to-watch.
Three years ago, Strum’s self-titled debut EP established him as a savvy electronic pop producer, creating slick works with features from the likes of Airling and Wafia. Since then, he’s put his head down, spending the last three years producing for Mallrat, Allday, Eilish Gilligan and more while working out the big question: where to now?
Now 22, Strum’s outlook is a little different. Glow centres Strum, who sings across the (markedly less hazy) album: it’s cliché to say that’s because he’s more confident now, but it’s also true.
Recorded across Melbourne, London and Brisbane (but not California, despite his recent Like A Version of The O.C.’s theme), Glow is an album shaped by the small but important moments within growing up: how friendships evolve and change in time, the difficulty of cross timezone crushes, and overthinking everything.
We asked Strum to talk us through Glow track-by-track, sharing how he made each track and its influences, from Coldplay to Death Cab.
‘Ready / Waiting’
The main arpeggio sound in ‘Ready / Waiting’ came out of a month at the start of the album writing process when I was trying to generate one instrumental or beat idea every day.
At the time, I had an old Prophet 500 synthesiser that barely lasted the length of a song without detuning, but I managed to capture a couple rounds of this pattern which I then placed in certain sections of the song.
When I wrote this song, I was thinking a lot about Coldplay actually! They have a really incredible way of making choruses explode, and I wanted to try and capture some of that feeling.
Billy Kennedy from Frightened Rabbit sent over some extra guitar parts and the sequenced bass that you hear in the second verse, which make this song extra special to me.
‘Imaginary Friends’
I wrote ‘Imaginary Friends’ with my friend Alex Burnett (of Sparkadia) in the kitchen of his apartment in London. It’s one of only a handful of songs on the record where the traditional elements of a song — lyrics, melody, chords — came before an instrumental idea.
The chordal hook that you hear in the intro and verses came a while after, when I was experimenting with different ways to add percussive movement to a fairly long, sustained sound. In this case, it was the flute sound on a Mellotron keyboard.
‘Cocoon’
‘Cocoon’ was the first song I wrote for this album, and is also probably the song that’s been through the most different versions.
During the album recording process, Ben [Allen, who co-produced the album] and I pulled up the multitrack of the recording of ‘Cocoon’ that was released as a single in 2016, and replaced the computer-generated rhythm section with live drums, guitar and bass.
‘Float’
‘Float’ was one of the last songs I worked on with Allen at his studio in Atlanta, and by that time we had already done so much of the hard work in making the record that we were feeling really comfortable and excited to experiment with different approaches.
The hi-hats come from a really fascinating old drum machine called the Pearl Syncussion, which can be fed recorded audio (in this case, the hi-hat microphone of the live drum recording) and replicate it in a digital form. The last thing we did in the recording process was all stand around a pair of overhead microphones and record a take of percussion overdubs – tambourine, shaker, cowbell and hand claps.
This took a few takes to get it right, as we were recording them all at the same time so the only way to turn the volume up or down on any given instrument was to place it closer or further away from the mics. I was a long way from making beats on Ableton in that moment.
‘Caving In’
‘Caving In’ is another song that came out of the writing sessions with Burnett and is about having a crush on someone who’s in a different country/timezone. In a way, it serves as a blueprint for the rest of the record, in that it’s a sad song that sounds happy with probably a few too many synth arpeggiators going on in the background.
‘Tell Me What You Mean By That’
‘Tell Me What You Mean By That’ is probably the song that came together the quickest on this album. I made it with my friend Demi in my studio space in Melbourne last year, and most of what you hear on the final version is unchanged from the initial demo.
My friends Graham and Hamish came over one day at the start of the year and helped me finish the song. Philippe Zdar, a producer we all love [and member of Cassius], had just passed away, and we added some poky muted guitar parts that we felt were channeling his production style.
The guitar track in Ableton was even titled “Philippe Gtrs”. Jackson McRae who plays drums in my live band emailed over some tambourine overdubs for the choruses as well.
‘Tongue Tied’ + ‘Fooling Around’
‘Tongue Tied’ and ‘Fooling Around’ are probably the two songs on Glow that feel the most different to the rest of my catalogue. I was listening to a lot of guitar bands — like Real Estate, The Strokes, Death Cab For Cutie, The War On Drugs — while making this record and really tried to capture some of that energy in these songs.
‘Wearing You Out’
‘Wearing You Out’is also unlike the rest of the album — it doesn’t make any effort in hiding that it’s a sad song. I wrote it about someone who I was really close to but who over time I found harder and harder to talk to. It’s a song about doubting yourself and second guessing every interaction that you have.
I sent an early demo of the song to my friend Greer and she sent back a recording with a duet part for the bridge that tied the song together in a really great way.
‘Glow’
Burnett and I wrote ‘Glow’ on his couch one day at the end of a session for another song. It was very much an afterthought — the two of us were sitting there with an acoustic guitar and voice memos open on my iPhone just in case we captured anything interesting. The song came together fairly quickly — it doesn’t have many lyrics — but we both knew that we were onto something special.
For a while I was so attached to that initial recording that I found it hard to make any kind of recording or arrangement progress with the song, so I sent it over to Graham [Ritchie, JW’s live bassist] who shared some incredible instrumental elements and production ideas that helped me crack the code and finish the arrangement.
Japanese Wallpaper’s debut album Glow is out now, via Wonderlick Recordings, with a national tour across October and November. Photo by Giulia Giannini McGauran.