CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS 146: POLISH CLUB ON BECOMING INDEPENDENT, MARRIAGE, LIFE AND MORE!
Interview by Matilda Elliott.
Eora-based brash rockers with hearts of gold, Polish Club, are back with their fourth album, Heavy Weight Heart, which was put out into the world 13 September.
Futuremag Music’s Matilda had the chance to chat with David Novak on topics including; the duo recently becoming completely independent after parting ways with their management and label, both Novak and John-Henry have been married in the past six or so months, Novak underwent open heart surgery in January this year (putting some huge realism to the album title, both in the form of matrimony and in a lesser lovey-dovey note, the medical procedure of heart surgery.
The discussion transcends beyond what the ‘literal’ setting of this album was for the guys, and delves into broader conceptual notions that can be connected with and crooned to by a wide amount of listeners. With four singles already out into the airways ahead of the album release, the duo have a way of hitting you hard in the feelings, all with a belter backbeat. In their single Heavyweight, the line “I’m not an afternoon, I’m entire lifetimes,” completely encapsulates the reflective tone and rumination that peaks through the album.
Read on to see how Matilda tried to seamlessly transition Polish Club’s opening spot for cult faves Spiderbait’s Black Betty 20th Anniversary Tour, with an awful arachnid mention;
FMM: Firstly, I'd love to understand your journey of creating Heavy Weight Heart, and how it differs from your previous albums
Novak: It was now a pretty long process, considering we started writing it maybe almost two years ago. Now, we kind of have a couple of co-writes with a friend of ours, Robbie, who usually like co-writes a bunch of pop songs and, well, just a wide variety of songs. We don't usually co-write songs for Polish Club, we have tried a couple of times, and it's just gone pretty poorly, but we just seem to have a rapport with Robbie and that kind of kick-started the process, and we ended up doing like four co-writes with other people, and then like five first the six remaining songs we wrote by ourselves.
John and I came into this process kind of thinking, this is going to be maybe our last big kind of major label record. And turns out, the one before it was our last major label record. So, we kind of like wrote all these big pop-rock songs or, well, I guess, like, kind of aspiring to be stadium rock songs, as some of them are, and we ended up just doing it independently, which has been awesome because we have full autonomy, but also kind of difficult because we thought we'd have a little bit of label money to play with.
It's been a weird album to make, and we're super proud of it, and we're super proud of ourselves for doing it pretty much 100% by ourselves at this point.
It’s been a wild 12 months for both John and I. We both got married, I had heart surgery, it's just been a lot going on. The album marks a pretty heavy for lack of a better word, I guess that's the pun. Pretty heavy time of life in general, though, yeah, we're, we're so stoked.
FMM: You mentioned that you had heart surgery, and you're also newly married, the two very opposite ends of the heart scale. Intensely real, yet poetic, how did those experiences influence the final creation of the album?
Novak: We kind of spaced out the writing of all the songs, so some of them were made way before all that stuff happened and, well, actually, no, they weren't. That's a lie. Because, like, I started having heart troubles, after the first time I had Covid, which was like 2021, I think it was or maybe 2022 either way, it was before, before we started writing these songs. So like, there was always, like, a bit of that in the back of the line, but when once we had all of the songs, the theme was there.
John helps that a lot. Sometimes when I'm hesitant to be like, “Okay, let's write about this, like, deeply personal experience,” or like, “Let's lean on that at least,” it often comes from him, because that's not my first tendency.
He's the one who came up with, Heavy Weight Heart as the title. Oftentimes it's like, he'll just like a word and how it sounds, or like the idea of a pun that has double meaning, like this one kind of does, if you think about it long enough, so I can just take that and make meaning from that. It's very much like we'll pass it off to each other and just try to make sense through our own volition, but also together. It seemed to be kind of tasteful enough but not too on the nose.
It's been a wild time, and there were moments where I was like, “I don't know if I'll be able to tour” because it was a big unknown. The surgery went well, and I feel better ish. We've had a few shows now that I’m… I can still do the band, that's fine. It's just a little bit more of a struggle. So everything is fine. There's the album tour coming out, where we have like a run of three shows in a row, because it's really hard to book venues now, because there are so many people trying to tour, especially the kind of medium-sized venues, and I'm just like, “Whoa, three shows in a row is gonna be something I gotta prep for like an Olympian”. I gotta start mentally preparing for that and doing vocal exercises and all that boring stuff, which isn't very romantic, but it's truth
FMM: I find myself wondering, how do you sort of have these deeply rooted and personal songs? How do you feel you're able to make them into something that's palpable for a broader scope of people, but not feel like you're putting all of your personal feelings and experiences out there?
Novak: I don't know. I feel like I'm a big believer in that once we release a song, it's kind of just out in the world, and whoever consumes it can just decide what it means to them. At uni, the last class I had was an argument with the tutor. This assignment was like, ‘What's this Marvin Gaye song about?’
Well, who gives a shit? It's about what I say it's about. So, I just kind of interpreted it in my own way. I don't know what that interpretation was, but the teacher was like, trying to tell me, no, you're wrong. It's about X, Y and Z. And I was just like, I don't know why. Like, why? Why was that? This is kind of the philosophy I have now moving forward, where it's like, I can tell you what it's about, and I can be like, really on the nose about it, but I prefer to have some sort of agri in there, and whoever listens to it, hopefully, can just apply that to their own deeply personal experience and kind of empathise with the overall emotional arc of that stuff I don't need to be like, “And then I walked in the room and prepared for surgery.” You're kind of narrowcasting at that point and I don't really feel the impetus to do that.
I think John and I have always enjoyed making music with the idea that music can be enjoyed by the biggest amount of people possible. And I don't think, in any way really compromises what makes us unique or what makes the music interesting or worthwhile. But, I guess that's just because both of us really like pop music as well and stuff that a lot of people would consider pretty basic and sometimes bad. I don't know, we're very we're not very precious about that.
FMM: I like that. Before I further delve into some more questions about the album itself and some arachnid creatures you're touring with. I'd love to understand, and I think you've briefly covered it here, but you use the line in Heavyweight that I love, and it's, “I'm not an afternoon of entire lifetimes.” Is that your way of ruminating on the fact that you know you're not putting a one-dimensional meaning to things, and that you want a more sort of, I'm gonna say, broad and less nuanced understanding of things?
Novak: We tend to get really bogged down in what's going on right now today. I want to sing about how I'm dealing right now and like, that's such a fleeting thing, and sometimes, if I get bogged down in it, it loses its impact. If you listen back to that at that time, and I feel like there's a bigger universal, specifically, in this case, happiness, that I've kind of grown to appreciate. And like my wife and I, she often tells me, I gotta screw this up. It's not a bad life. It's just a bad day. So it's kind of playing on that, you know, the greater picture of knowing that sometimes things are sucky for a little while, but you can't really get bogged down with that. And even, like, further on to that, just focus on everything's kind of on an upward trajectory. And John and my life, I feel like we're both kind of seeing the forest for the trees. And if that's the same, I don't even know, but sounds right. Things are pretty good, and there's a lot of privilege and luckiness there. I don't know. Maybe we're just getting old, but it's not as cool to be singing about getting old. So. that's my roundabout way of doing so I guess
FMM: So, you guys won the 2024, most played rock APRA award for Good Time. Can you tell me how it felt to get this recognition?
Novak: Ridiculous! Really, really, really funny. We wrote that song as a joke. Well, not as a joke, but we came into the studio again with Robbie, who we wrote, like Heavyweight, Manilla and a couple of other tracks with and we were like, “Let's write a song that we can just give to like a brand or a TV station and we can not treat it super seriously and hopefully make a bit of money.” A real throwaway, kind of catchphrase song.
So, I went to a publisher who's responsible for putting writers into rooms and getting them to write for an ad and or just putting writers together for any purpose, really, and they're really good at that. And so I told our publisher, I'm like, can you just email me a list of catchphrases that you didn't work in, like, ads? And he sent me an email. I took every single one in order and just sang it in one with one note, so it's just like, wow, Hi, I'm feeling good. Make you feel good with that feeling already, like, that's just his email. And it fucking worked, like immediately picked up for the theme of the NRL. And I had to do 100 and something versions of it with all of the NRL matchups. But because of that, it got played, like, I don't know, 1000s of times, and we won the award. So we kind of like, hacked into the system. We gained it to our advantage, and it fully worked. And, it's not really my concern whether or not it could solve, but we kind of really love doing that. It's like a game writing to a brief and just trying to divorce yourself from what you want. But, what are your skills and how can you make the most of that and also glean what someone else wants from a song?
It was just like this weird, completely unexpected victory for us, which is hilarious, because I was like, I don't know, two months out of surgery as well. So I was just like, what's going on? It was amazing. We were surprisingly so happy with it.
FMM: That's so funny - that backstory just makes me want to listen to the song again. Just thinking of your publicist’s email and you, just verbatim, reading.
Nobak: I ran out of catchphrases in the second verse, and I just started making up, like, random German. And I think there's a little bit of French in there. It's actual nonsense, which I think is fun, because, I think initially, we just wanted to write a silly, poppy kind of song. So, I just gave up the four chords and played it on a guitar. In the background, we were just kind of thinking of the nonsensical nature of, blur song two, but like, made for a footy ad, which I guess is exactly what it is.
FMM: I'm not even a big NRL person at all. But I’m originally from the Penrith catchment area, so cannot complain at all with my trifecta team, but you have all these new people now listening to your music, introduced to you through the beautiful sport that is NRL. Speaking of, you're supporting Spiderbait on their 20th anniversary tour of Black Betty. How did this come about? And how do you feel to be such a part of such a milestone tour?
Novak: It's honestly the most fun thing you could do as a band. I think in general; a lot of people would disagree. I'd say that they want to play their own shows, but it's such a low-stakes thing as, like the main support on a tour of a really beloved band, where we can so we're playing like half the tour. I think we do six out of 12 shows, and we get, like guaranteed pay. We play for 35 minutes. We have like, a five-minute sound check because John and I are playing it as a two-piece, and that's like, that's it. And it's like a really easy win. We know it's by the way, it sounds like we know what their fans are expecting from them. So, we can kind of just like, tailor a set to that I play two-minute bullshit rock songs that we like, mostly from our first album, which is just really fun for us to do. So, it's just like, a really easy win. And they're super nice, and everyone's been super nice, and it's way bigger than what we would usually play. The chance to get play a huge venue is not something we've had very often.
I think we've probably played it maybe once or twice with some other people. It's so much fun. It feels like cheating, just doing our own album tour is amazing. That is once the shows actually come around the planning of it is nightmarish, especially now, because people aren't really buying as many tickets as they used to, in general. Like, that's very much the five I get for everyone. People aren't really going to shows.
It’s just really hard online to have to spend money on forcing people to see our ads all the time. It's very unromantic where there used to be street press and heaps of radio support. Now it's just like, you're on your own, you’ve got to spend money on it. It's something you would hate if you were, so it's tough. But like, doing the support thing, we don't have to do any of that, and we just show up, and there’s like a couple thousand people there, and it’s like, this is incredible. It’s really been a huge breath of fresh air.
FMM: Love that. And you kind of touched on this point that I'm interested in delving a little bit further into. So, you are completely independent now, and we chatted about that a little bit earlier. But, how does it feel, having the buck completely fall on yourself and John?
Novak: Yeah, a lot of it, we've always done ourselves. We've been pretty autonomous in terms of marketing ourselves on socials and stuff. We got a lot of support, not a lot. But, I mean, I guess it's all relative compared to how much we can afford to spend ourselves, which is almost nothing. We got a lot of support from our label marketing-wise. But in terms of doing the work and being responsible for it, I mean, it was basically us and our manager, like, from last year and all the years before that, but now it's just John and I, and honestly, not much day-to-day has changed. I think the big thing is, you don't have someone reminding you to do stuff, which is a pretty stressful thing. I have to remember to book gear and stuff, which shows, do it, you're gonna show up at the venue and there's gonna be nothing there. Or, you know, book someone's flight, all the dry stuff. But in terms of the fun stuff about being in the band, it's pretty liberating, because we couldn’t do anything before. We felt like we got to fight against someone, be it a label, a manager or whoever, to be, like, should we, I don't know, go to Europe, we could just do that now. I mean, we can't afford to do it.
It does feel, in a much, much smaller regard, that the world is our oyster. In a sense, you just gotta be smart with your decisions, I guess, because no one knows, you just have less and less and less people to be like, hang on. That's a silly idea. So, you kind of have to back yourself and be a certain level of overconfident in this case. But, I think that's the exciting part. No, that's very like, we fully decided, sorry, we fully decided that what we're gonna do for like, the next two or three records as well, which would never happen before with a major label. Because if you have a major label, your whole life depends on them being like, okay, record those songs. And 99% of the time it's just like, “What about this song? What about this song? What about this song? And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.”
So, now we're like, how about we make a record of those 10 songs we wrote five years ago, and it's like, Yep, cool. I mean, there's only two of us, and there's not much going on, so we can probably do it for super cheap, but we could do it in a weekend. I feel like that's our future where we just do heaps of stuff. Simply love that. I say that now, but we haven't actually gone to do it yet, so maybe I'm in for a rude awakening. The logistics of it, but like, the prospect of it is really exciting.
FMM: Can't wait to see yet more frequent new Polish Club, or even, as you said, back releases that the label did not love coming forward.
Novak: A lot of that. There's a lot of that.
FMM: So, you are doing your headline tour in October. What can loyal fans, new Polish Club fans, expect from these shows?
Novak: Well, I felt really bad at the Spiderbait because every now and then someone would request a brand-new song, which is exactly what you want to hear, yeah, but we can't. There's a lot of them that we can't play as a two-piece. Or we could, but it just wouldn't be good or appropriate. So it's nice to have these album tour shows because we'll have four people on stage, we'll be able to play like all of the new songs, which there are quite a few moving parts, but I think we've figured out all of them, so there's a good selection to choose from. It just feels like a completely different band.
I know it's not. At the end of the day, when you're in it and you're living in it, it feels like two different worlds. Maybe that's just a perspective thing, but to be able to play as a four-piece, is always really exciting to me, even though that's probably counterintuitive to a lot of people, because they think the two-piece thing kind of sets us apart. And if it turns you off, we will absolutely be going back to a two-piece at some point, just getting on stage and pretending to be the Foo Fighters or something stupid. It's really fun for me. It's like a classic vibe that I think in the context of Polish Club, feels really special to us because we get to do something different.
But, whether or not people agree with that, I don't know, but we're still going to be playing the popular songs that people like as well. So, there's something for everyone, basically, a variety mix.
FMM: There goes my hero. I can't think of any other Foo Fighters things to say, sorry that was awful. Before we wrap up, do you have any additional comments or anything else you'd like to add?
Novak: I'm just very grateful that people still care. I think it's when you lose the backing of a label, it's not like we've been abandoned, but, you know, when you kind of go out on your own, you feel like a bit of a dickhead for making a big deal out of it. But the tangible feeling of it is really strong. So, every direct feedback we get feels really intimate now. So, people liking posts or simple things, like just commenting on a post, or saying hi after a Spiderbait show, it feels more real than ever.
And maybe that's just because we also just had, like a somewhat extended period away from that. And I think Covid really fucked us in terms of feeling like a band within that exists amongst people, we still felt like a band amongst ourselves; that won't change, but being amongst not even fans, but just people who can react to what you're doing, I think that's something we don't take for granted. It's always like an uphill battle nowadays, especially online. But every time it goes well, it feels really good, so there's some really big, positive feedback going on there, which is fantastic.