The Presets

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • Apocalypso (Deluxe)
    Apocalypso (Deluxe)

    “We were working so fast and hard, we didn’t really have time to consider the wider impact that the album was gonna have,” Julian Hamilton tells Apple Music of The Presets’ 2008 album Apocalypso. The Sydney duo of Hamilton and Kim Moyes were at the pinnacle of Australia’s electronic scene, and tracks like “My People” and “This Boy’s In Love” have prevailed as dance-floor-fillers and definitive classics from the era. At the time, though, they didn’t realise the effect their music was having. “We weren’t fully aware of the amazing energy and this broader thing we managed to capture on the record,” Hamilton says. “It had this furious energy and excitement. It was only years later that we were like, ‘Holy shit, that’s a real moment in time that we captured.’” “We were constantly touring around the world and trying to fit studio sessions around that,” says Moyes. “The whole period was intensely full-on, we were just so deep in the eye of the storm. At that point in our lives, that’s who we were: these really hyper-energetic, maniacal musicians. But not long after that we became parents, so those people kinda changed a bit.” Looking back at Apocalypso, the duo find plenty they’d want to change—but even more that they still love. “There’s a moment in everything you make where you kind of cringe and you wish you’d done a better job,” Moyes says. “But even those moments still resonate today, people still really love it. So who am I to say that something is wrong or should be changed? It was just a funny, furious time in our lives.” Below, The Presets talk through each track on the album that thrust them into the spotlight. Kicking and Screaming Julian Hamilton: “We were doing a lot of support touring at that time, with Ladytron, Soulwax, The Rapture, which is a band we really liked. We were at sound check in Los Angeles. Often that was the only chance we got to actually play our instruments and come up with ideas, because we were always on an aeroplane or a bus. I remember sitting at sound check with a synth, playing around with this little bassline, and Kim started playing the drums along. We both looked at each other and nodded, and thought, that’s one to store in the memory bank and play with when we got home a few months later.” Kim Moyes: “I remember that was one of the first two tracks we’d finished. We got to do a support slot for Daft Punk at a stadium, and ‘My People’ had just come out on the radio. We played ‘Kicking and Screaming’ as well, and it was quite reassuring that it didn’t fall flat on its face.” My People JH: “All of these songs started out with one of us noodling about on a synth or a drum machine, passing it back and forth and building them up, tearing them down and building them up again—and this was one of those tracks. I can remember it started in this corrugated iron shed that I was working in, behind a church, in Sydney. I just played this kind of rocking bassline and Kim really liked it, so he tore it apart and chopped it up a bit, and that was the bones of a track. The whole time, we were really just trying to do our version of ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC.” A New Sky KM: “We were on tour in Europe doing festivals and we’d based ourselves in Berlin. We’d have a good couple of days between festivals to mess around with ideas and come up with new ones, and I was just bored one day, so I started cutting up some guitar loops and bass sounds. We finished it off a few months later, when we got back home to Sydney. Jules ended up putting on the really sweet choral stuff at the beginning—that really made the track come to life and made it more special than it was. It was never really a single, more of a character piece.” This Boy’s In Love JH: We were spending so much time away on tour, and then we’d get home and we’d just be going out and partying. There wasn’t much time to knuckle down and get a good start on the album, so we decided we had to get out of town and get away from the clubs. We hired this farmhouse in Bellingen, in northern New South Wales, to set up all of our synths for two weeks and get a collection of beats and put some songs together. And this one came together up there. I was programming this Giorgio Moroder-style synth and Kim put this really tough beat on it. I took that away to my studio and tried to throw a million different vocals at it. I think I was trying to copy that big Joy Division-style vocal, and I had a falsetto line on top to add a bit of prettiness to it. One night I was listening to it and accidentally muted the lead vocals, so it just had the background vocal. I thought, ‘Hang on, that’s a bit more interesting than that big run-of-the-mill lead vocal.’ And the rest is history. There were a lot of happy accidents when you’re making this stuff. Suddenly you make one little mistake and something just sits in place in an interesting way that you couldn’t have come up with if you tried.” Yippiyo-Ay JH: “I won’t lie, I went through a long period where I cringed when I hear this song, like, ‘God, what was I thinking?’ Especially in this era—I’m not sure a song like this would pass muster today. But listening back, it was a time and a place, we were young, and it was just a silly, comical jam. Lyrically, character-wise I liked exploring different characters and personalities, people you’d seen in songs, because otherwise you’d just be writing a bunch of songs about airports and room service.” Talk Like That JH: “We never used to write like 30 songs to pick the 10 best; we’d literally make 11 tracks and put 10 on the album. We didn’t have a lot of fat to cut off. We had about eight songs, but we thought we probably needed a few more high-energy moments to make the album feel a bit more balanced. So Kim made this kick and snare pattern and I worked on the bassline, and we both liked it, it had a lot of punch. I remember one night we went to see Björk, and it was a really lovely show, but the whole night I’m thinking, ‘Fuck, after this gig I’ve gotta go to the studio and write a song.’ So after the Björk show I went and wrote the lyrics. I don’t know if those things are connected in any way.” Eucalyptus KM: “It was made around the same time as ‘Talk Like That’. Tempo-wise, it’s the fastest thing we’ve ever made, the punkiest thing we’ve ever made. It always reminded me of Suicide. It felt like an awesome energy to put on a dance record. It’s completely in its own world. In terms of subject matter, it’s more of a companion piece to ‘My People’.” JH: “It’s a bit more politically charged. I think John Howard had just lost the election and I was still angry at him, even though he had lost. I was pissed off at the culture he’d changed and the legacy he’d left and all the time it was going to take to undo all of the bad shit. Lyrically it was a bit of an ‘up yours’ to him.” If I Know You JH: “We’d gotten this synth from the US that a lot of the French house guys were using at the time. We started making this big, epic French house track: big, powerful, lush, romantic chords with a lot of power. I wrote this big vocal over it, almost like a Human League or Spandau Ballet, new romantic, emotional pop song. It was a vibe. Kim suggested killing all the instrumental and starting again, and it was the right call. We made more of a techno beat under it, with a really different mood. But the vocal stayed the same.” KM: There was almost too much epic-ness in the original version; we decided to just leave the epic-ness in the vocal performance and make the rest more minimal. It’s a love song from the perspective of a woman to a man. Jules was like, ‘I always thought it would be cool to do the reverse of a breakup song and sing it from the other person’s perspective.’” Together KM: “It was absolutely just an exercise in furious energy, which is exactly what we were trying to go for. This is the one we all agree on as the weakest moment on the album, but ironically it’s so fun to play live. It’s only weak in comparison to how visceral everything else is. It’s still fire, it’s still got some great moments.” Aeons KM: “‘Aeons’ started as a really beautiful chord pattern that we came up with on the farm. It’s the same kind of story as ‘If I Know You’—it was verging towards a really big, almost orchestral synth world, like Vangelis or Jean-Michel Jarre, but it’s hard to make that stuff sound legitimate because it can be a bit of a cliché. It was just a case of, all right, we’ve got these beautiful chords and melody and we really like the world it’s creating. It was just a case of recording 50 different synthesiser patches and piecing them all together as a big patchwork collage. It’s the only track on the record that’s instrumental; we both really believed in it as an instrumental, which we both love and have grown up with, and we’ve both been in other instrumental bands. It was just another nice piece in the puzzle in terms of what we’re about.” Anywhere JH: “We worked on this in the shed together. It’s probably one of the simpler, most chilled-out tracks on the album, even though it’s super fast. This was one of the more chilled, blissful, lighter moments on the record. I really like that Smiths song ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, and I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll write a song from the other character in that track.’ So I had this scene painted in my mind that I could write about. It’s just a love song, really.”

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About The Presets

When danceable electronic textures dominated indie music in the late 2000s, The Presets were among the groups propelling the movement’s innovation. The Australian duo paired the propulsive beats and musical precision of ’80s synth-pop with house music’s exuberant grooves and electroclash’s rowdy vibe. Cofounders Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes met in the ’90s, when both were first-year students at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The pair joined an electronic-leaning group named Prop before forming The Presets in 2003 and debuting with the EP Blow Up, which featured Silverchair’s Daniel Johns on “Cookie”. Their 2005 release Beams spawned the electro-punk stomp “Are You the One?” and set the stage for 2008’s Apocalypso, which topped the Australian album charts and featured multiple hit singles, including the techno-pop anthem “My People” (a critique of the Australian practice of placing asylum seekers in detention centres) and the darkwave gem “This Boy’s In Love”. As their popularity grew, The Presets continued to juggle a recording career with remixing work for artists such as Kings of Leon, Kylie Minogue and Tove Lo, along with high-profile collaborations, such as a 2019 EP with fellow Australian electronic iconoclast Golden Features.

ORIGIN
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
FORMED
2003
GENRE
Electronic

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