Lucky We Found Each Other: Mosquito Coast’s new music takes a dreamy look at relationships

The Perth dream pop band have released their new single “Sweet Talking”, a punky song about new romance. One half of the band, Conor Barton, chats about ditching his drum kit, the relationships that have influenced the upcoming debut album, and how he’s looking forward to his granny seeing the band.

It’s the new start to the new year, that magical January date on the calendar where we promise ourselves that we’ll do better this time around. For one half of Mosquito Coast Conor Barton, it was to drink less coffee. Chatting to him after he’s finished a red eye early morning cafe shift though, Barton’s given the idea a shrug with a workplace espresso binge. “That was a resolution that I’ve already thrown in the bin,” he laughs.

With or without coffee, it’s shaping up to be a buzzing year for the young Perth band, on the back of an action packed 2018. The previous year saw the two-piece retrofit their 4-piece live outfit with a new drummer, record their debut album in New York and release and tour their single “Skipping Girl” as a teaser for 2019’s album launch. The new year for Mosquito Coast, is already off to a cracker start with their next single “Sweet Talking” out in the world and a national tour on the cards.

Barton himself, has seen a big change to his role in Mosquito Coast’s music. He’s softly spoken as he details moving from drummer to keyboard player, which includes taking on more vocal duties in harmony with the band’s vocalist/guitarist Naomi Robinson. The shift, Barton attributes, is to his growing assuredness through the thoughtful support of his bandmate. “I was getting more confident with singing and Nomes was pushing me to sing more, which was really nice of her,” he says endearingly. As Barton reflects on Mosquito Coast’s epic happenings, it’s clear that the magnetism behind the band’s dreamy sound draws from the longtime friendship between the group’s two founders. Barton warmly explains, “Nomes is a big part of me making music. There’s not many people I find that I can collaborate so well with and so easily. I’m definitely so lucky that we found each other.”

The connection between themselves and others, are a source of inspiration in Mosquito Coast’s charming songwriting. Their latest single “Sweet Talking” is an upbeat punky pop track that has Robinson bouncing spoken words at a newfound romance. “The whole song weighs up the really fun and exciting start to some relationships and how you can get caught up with them,” says Barton. “Then the chorus kind of compares it to longer-term goals and visions and questioning are those short and sweet moments really what you want?” Through tracks like “Sweet Talking”, the band offer an alluring parallel into the very relatable life experiences of new twenty-somethings growing up. “Nomes and I have both entered into bigger relationships than before, so I think we see different things to look for,” reflects Barton.

Leading up to their debut album release, “Sweet Talking” serves as a glorious peek into Mosquito Coast’s bigger and brighter sound, with their line of storytelling carefully developed into each track. Barton points out, “Every song is a small little snapshot into an intimate relationship, whether it be me and Nomes, or me and my partner, or you and your parents, or watching another relationship play out.” Testament to his words, Barton happily discloses that his grandmother is coming to the next Mosquito Coast show in their hometown. “Playing Perth is always fun when you know all your friends and family in the audience and you can look out and smile at people. I mean you can do that anyway, but when it’s your mum or your aunty or heaven forbid my granny’s coming to the next show. It’s nice to see them around and see their reactions,” chuckles Barton.

Q. Dream pop exists in this amazing space between shoegaze, psychedelic and new wave music. What draws you guys to the sound?

CB: Dream pop puts a lot of importance on finding really good sounds, you’re always looking for interesting textures. I find myself always using 80’s string synthesizer sounds but having the cutoff rolled off completely so that it’s really paddy and atmospheric. Our version of dream pop is like shoegaze but without the attention span. [Shoegaze] have such long songs and there’s no change, but I feel like we’re too anxious for that, we have to keep changing.

Q. You’re always writing the music before words?

CB: Yeah, always. For most of the tracks, Naomi comes up with the initial idea, like whether that’s a full loop on a guitar with a drum beat, or in the case of “Sweet Talking” it was a little guitar line that kept repeating. Most of the time we try and lock ourselves away and keep building on that until we’ve found a groove into it. This album process was quite a long one, we started writing it last June.

Q. Compared to your previous EP, what’s new about your approach lyrically?

With the last EP, it was our first time making a big body of work. So ‘A’, we didn’t have that much writing experience and ‘B’, I don’t think we had that much to draw upon. Whereas this time I feel like we’ve matured a little. We definitely had more experiences to draw on in the last couple of years. We’ve tried to be more direct in our lyrics because the last one was quite bound up in escapism, running away from problems and being quite vague.

Q. How did it come about for you to have a bigger vocal part?

When we were touring the EP, I ended up backing Naomi in the songs, so it came naturally to start singing the octave below her. We were also encouraged while writing the album to sing the parts that we wanted to hear. So in “Skipping Girl”, our last single, there’s this little weird vocal bit with these half noises and that was something we wanted to play on the bass but we ended up keeping the vocal part. A lot of it was recording it before we forget it, and a lot of those parts ended up on the album! Like in “Sweet Talking” there’s a really cool little vocoder riff.

Q. Was this new vocal direction something that came from your producer or yourselves?

It was a bit of both. One, we had the time to experiment and if something didn’t sound good we could just take it out. Secondly, we did have a new producer. We went to New York to record with Nicolas Vernhes and he was really encouraging and he definitely taught us a lot. And thirdly, I think we’re just getting more confident.

Q. Tell us more about recording in New York!

It was pretty crazy! When we were looking at who to record our next body of work with we looked at all of our favourite bands and tried to find out who their producers were and why we liked those sounds. Our manager emailed a whole bunch of really big overseas producers and Nick was the only one to get back to us. He was my favourite, he’d just the won the Grammy for making the War on Drugs record and he also worked on really cool albums like Wild Nothings. I really like them. It was just insane that he was even interested. And then it happened quite quickly, we found out in January and then we flew over at the end of March. There were a couple of songs that Naomi showed me on the plane to New York, so it’s nice that there’s a couple of songs that are years old, and there’s a couple of songs that were fresh in the studio.

Q. You’ve moved from drums to playing keys with the new live set up. How does it feel to be at the front of the stage rather than the back?

CB: I love it so much, I’m never playing drums again! (laughs) I play drums and all the keyboards on the album, but it just felt way more convenient to be up the front. If I’m on keys then I can focus on singing a bit more and play the parts that I wrote. It’s also nice having Nomes and I next to each other so we can look over at each other.

Q. Mosquito Coast have been pretty busy with tours, do you guys have a favourite place to play?

CB: We had an incredible time at Bigsound [in Brisbane], it was our second show back with our new live band playing all the new album songs. And we played incredibly! We were just so proud of each other and stoked that we pulled it off. That was a really nice moment once the last song ended and we looked around and were like “YES!” Because we’re touring with a far more complicated rig, the first show we played in Sydney had all these technical difficulties and people couldn’t hear themselves properly. But the Bigsound show really ironed out the creases and the first time we felt really confident on stage with the new songs. That was definitely an achievement.

Q. With the album recorded in March last year, you’ve had to wait a while for the album to be released, are you excited?

Yes I am! So excited. There’s just so many songs that we fought over for singles, so I really just want people to hear them. I think it’s the most varied set of work that we’ve done. It’ll be interesting to see which ones people are drawn to because it’s never the ones you expect.

Q. Can you tell us what the album sounds like?

There’s a lot more synths, lots of shiny sparkly sounds, lots of nice warm textures and there’s a lot more fun vocal harmonies and little earworms that get played through the album. There’s definitely more mature and sadder and darker sections, and there’s some real poppy stuff where you can hear “Skipping Girl” and “Sweet Talking”. We also tried really hard to work with dynamics, so there’s really quiet soft subtle songs, and there’s some big ballads.

Q. What are you guys listening to at the moment?

When we went down to Mandurah, it was 8 in the morning and we had a 3 hour drive, we listened to heaps of industrial music. Just lots of dance and darker music. There’s a girl from Canada called Marie Davidson that we’re both really into. Smashing all the Beach House albums, and War on Drugs. Who knows, there might be more drum machines and synths in the next couple of things we do. More funk? Who knows.