Max Johns talks with Andrew Wilson about AW, his kind-of-solo project that definitely isn’t Die! Die! Die! and which is touring to our town soon. Oh, and it’s got a big Hamilton connection, too.
THE NERVE by AW, released in December, is a deceptive album. You can listen to it seven or eight times and come away with seven or eight different impressions.
It’s an album of poetic fragments, lyrics that echo heavily but are worth straining your ears for. It’s a guitar album by a singular player who works a minimalist, trebly sound. It’s a scrapbook of one-take songs thrown together by a lo-fi duo who just want to make something. It’s music in the negative, made whole by the voluminous space between guitar and bass. It’s a new take on the dark 80s underground sound that followed Joy Division. It’s Andrew Wilson staking out a new place, something separate from the band he’s been leading for almost the entire 21st century, Die! Die! Die!
As the name would suggest, AW began as a solo project. Andrew says, “I had an operation at the end of 2023, and I was sort of stuck at home, not working and looking after my son, just trying to get out of the headspace I was in.”
Comparisons to Die! Die! Die! were always going to happen, but AW wasn’t a reaction to, or a replacement for, anything else. DDD are as much of a unit as ever: they played Port Noise in Christchurch just a few days ago.
“AW is a bit of a different outlet. It wasn’t really wanting to be different from Die! Die! Die!. It was more just wanting to still be creating, and not having to rely on Die! Die! Die!.
“I did want to make it a little bit more minimal. The idea of recording really quietly was another side. Especially for the first EP [2024’s SIMPLE SONGS], I wanted no guitar effects pedal on it. But then for the album, my friend sent me a pedal that sounded really insane.”
For AW’s recording sessions, Stefan Neville joined Andrew on drums and took charge of the recording as well. If you’re a keen-eared HUP reader of a certain vintage, you’ll already be proudly recalling that Stefan is one of ours, someone who became world famous in Hamilton in the 90s as a member of Dribbly Cat Attraction. That’s not one of the groups that Andrew cites, though.
He says, “Working with Stefan is really good. I really like the stuff he’s done. Pumice albums are amazing. I love the stuff he’s done with The Cooleys and that new band with Matt [Plunkett], What Kind of Human Have I Become.”
“There wasn’t really any sound I was going for other than not trying to be the loudest band in the world. The first AW EP sounded really cool, and people I played it to really liked it. So we thought, we’re on to something.”
When Andrew and Stefan decided to make an AW album, recording happened fast. ‘Done’ is better than ‘perfect’.
“AW’s really just about using what was there. We used whatever bass amp was in Stefan’s studio, and the guitar amp was this little Jansen amp. We recorded with a SingStar microphone! Literally a SingStar microphone. I’ll send you a photo.”
I was going to ask about that. I’d wondered whether the phrase “vocal effects” might be a bit fancy for what went on.
Andrew says, “It was quite cool to work towards finishing a record, just going and hanging out and recording. We’d bash out three or four songs in one day, and then we’d come back the next week and do it again. It was all one take, so you’re only hearing one vocal take each time.
“I can be super neurotic and Stafan’s almost the anti-neurotic guy. That difference is a really good combination for us. So basically, if Stefan thought something was finished, I’d just agree with him. Because I could keep picking at it. You know what I mean? But if he thought it was finished, it was finished.”
Since Andrew is everything except the drummer, he’s been playing bass for the first time in a long time. He says, “I used to be a bass player and I really do enjoy it in my weird, little tuning. When I was in a band called Carriage H in high school I played bass and we’d build songs around the bass lines…”
He catches himself and gets deflective, saying that today he can’t compare to the “amazing” Die! Die! Die! bassist Lachie Anderson, and that the others in Carriage H were “more proficient, musically”. One of those teenage mates was drummer Mikey Prain, the other third of DDD.
AW isn’t the first time that Andrew has worked on music without Mikey and Lachlan (or whoever else was on bass for DDD at the time). He says, “After almost every single Die! Die! Die! album, I’ve started recording in a different way, and then I’ve almost never let it see the light of day. I did the MASKS thing, but then I got Lachlan to help out, and Mikey ended up playing drums on it. We knew it sounded really different to Die! Die! Die!, so we released it as MASKS.
“There’s been quite a lot of other things. I’ve worked with Jeremy Toy quite a bit, but never had the guts to actually finish it and put it out into the world.
It’s funny that a guy with at least 10 albums & EPs in his back catalogue still says that it takes guts to release music, but Andrew sees solo projects differently.
He says, “I’ll put it like this: you can’t find Die! Die! Die! lyrics online. With AW I’ve put all the lyrics out to read. It’s basically because I think of AW as my project, whereas DDD has always been a collective. The guys might disagree with that fact. They might say that I’m a bit of a dictator, but I do always feel an obligation to them, so I’ve been a bit shy, lyrically. Whereas AW needs to be my own.
“When I’m writing now I might think, ‘maybe this is an AW thing rather than a Die! Die! Die! thing’. It’s going to be quite interesting to see how that goes, moving forward.”
Andrew’s not sure how the two things will fit together in the future.
He says, “I’ve already started working on more songs with Stefan, but the water went off the boil because I didn’t finish them at the moment. Then DDD started doing Port Noise, and there’s only so much time I can get away from real life to focus on these creative endeavors.
“But yeah, I do think I probably want to try, I don’t know, maybe recording not with a SingStar microphone! Do you know what I mean? Keeping parts of the charm of it and maybe trying to make it a little bit more refined. The ‘one take’ thing is really good because it really took me out of my comfort zone, but we’ll see.
“When I think about other records I’ve made, did the extra refining added anything? Maybe on some albums, maybe not on others.”
Before we get too ahead of ourselves, there’s the first ever AW live tour to get through. Celebrating the release of THE NERVE a few months after the fact, the live iteration of AW is different to the recording duo. There’s no Stefan, so Andrew’s invited a couple of friends along—Kim Martinengo (drums) and Morgan Leary (bass). When we spoke they’d played four shows, all in Auckland. If you’re reading this after Friday the 13th, the actual number is bigger now.
Andrew says, ”It’s been great. We’ve reimagined the songs without Stefan, because Stefan’s quite a distinctive drummer. I’ve been trying to show Morgan how to play my demented bass lines. It’s been quite interesting, and Morgan’s done a really great job.”
It’s been a long time since he’s formed a new band.
“With the AW guys, I’m definitely learning. They’ll stop between the songs, and I’m so not used to that. With Die! Die! Die!, I know how they play, and they know how I play. We don’t stop between songs. We’ll say, ‘Hello,’ and then we’ll get into it,” Andrew says.
He jokes that his regular bandmates’ reaction to AW has been “positive…to my face, anyway”.
“It’s funny, because I’ve had people say they prefer it to Die! Die! Die!, and then I kind of get offended. Then I have people who say that they much prefer Die! Die! Die!, and I’m offended again.”
Hamilton will get our chance to work out which way around to offend Andrew when AW play at Misoverse, Victoria on the River, on March 28. They’ll be supported by Mooring and you can get tickets through Under the Radar.
