Most people remember their teenage bedrooms. For some, they were places of escape, buried in posters or band tees, while for others, they are nostalgic rooms littered with remnants from childhood. For Jonnine Standish—vocalist and lyricist of the Australian experimental post-punk band HTRK—a recurring dream about her adolescent bedroom sparked the meaning behind their Freudian track Dream Symbol, released in 2019 and re-released this year as a remix by a friend of the band, Loraine James. When I call up HTRK, it’s 9 AM in Melbourne; Standish sips tea while bright sunlight streams through her windows. The band’s guitarist, Nigel Yang, keeps his camera off after fighting a bad cold earlier in the week, and I apologise for calling from my bright pink childhood bedroom. “Everything’s come full circle,” Standish replies with a smile, showing appreciation for the “Dream Symbol” parallel.

During our time together, Standish and Yang are open, reflective, and curious about each other’s experiences—everything you’d hope to hear from band members who have created five albums together and spent two decades side by side. In fact, HTRK (pronounced as “Hate Rock” in reference to the band’s former name, “Hate Rock Trio,” which was changed after bassist and friend Sean Stewart passed away in 2010) celebrated its 21st birthday this November, inviting Melbourne-based fans and strangers into the “Psychic 9-5 Club” pop-up—an alcohol-free alternative club space occurring during work hours. This idea was first imagined ten years ago when the band released their studio album of the same name. “It was a space for people to literally just hang out and listen to music between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, where we DJed, and our friends DJed,” Standish tells C41. “Nigel made everyone a free cup of matcha, and I just chatted to people and washed some dishes.”

While it may feel rare in 2024’s social media-driven music landscape, connecting on a more personal level with the band isn’t too unusual for HTRK fans. Besides opting for old-school communication methods like hand-replying to fan mail or sending out merchandise directly, each new record has granted fans full access to Yang and Standish’s shifting tastes, interests, and emotions. Rewind to the band’s early years, and you’ll hear the aggressive, pulsating basslines, screeching feedback, and haunting lyrics reflecting the younger, more nihilistic years the band spent in Berlin and London. Both 2011’s Work, Work, Work and 2014’s Psychic 9-5 Club display shifts towards more minimal, sensual, and meditative sounds amid a period of processing their grief over their bandmate’s passing. Meanwhile, 2019’s Venus in Leo and 2021’s Rhinestones grow gentler and more poetic than ever before, delving into indie rock and country spaces.

Despite changes in age, genre, and mood, however, the duo insists that making music is mostly the same as it was in their early years. “It’s as simple as turning up together, having some snacks, talking a lot, and just really enjoying the process of writing music together,” Standish tells C41. “It’s predominantly a guitar and vocal exercise and how these two quite emotional and dated instruments come together in ways that are interesting to us.”

Now, settled down in Melbourne after the chaos of this summer’s European tour, the band is carving out their next creative era together, which will no doubt unveil another unexpected and razor-sharp rebirth. Here, we speak to Standish and Nigel about their earliest music memories, biohacking as a creative practice, and their affinity for sweaty, incandescent stage lights.

Hannah Bertolino: Can you recall your first memories of music or the moments you knew it was something you wanted to pursue? While researching for this piece I read a lot about how you met and your time in Berlin and London, but I don’t know much about before you became a band.

Nigel Yang: My parents grew up in Malaysia, and they were never given any opportunities to learn anything like that, so one of the most important things for them was to give their kids music lessons—I think that’s pretty common with a lot of Asian migrants. I learned classical music from a young age, but that was so different from the desire to want to be in a band which came along…

Jonnine Standish: What age were you when you started playing classical?

NY: I started when I was eight, and I was very disciplined—I did it all the way through and went to university to do it as well, but I got into grunge in the late 90s as a teenager. I went to a private boys school where music really wasn’t a part of life there until this cool kid came in with an electric guitar, and at lunch time on a rainy day he just plugged in and started playing—like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Metallica—and that was the first time that I’d ever been around that scene and heard an electric guitar in real life. After that I was just like, “I have to learn that,” and just taught myself.

JS: [Laughs] You know, I didn’t know that!

NY: It was that one guy!

JS: What’s his name then?

NY: [Laughs] Sean Clinger!

HB: Little did he know that he started it all!

JS: Funnily enough—while I was listening to you, Nigel—we have a very similar childhood in one way, but very different in another. I had classical piano lessons from the age of eight up until when I dropped out around 16-years-old, because I got way too interested in socialising and underaged night clubs and being a menace. My father was the one who introduced me to pop, like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Cure, Prince, Madonna—we shared [music tastes] up until Smells Like Teen Spirit. We would buy cassettes from the mainstream music shop, and whatever was in the top ten, we would love. I didn’t discover my own musical tastes outside of the mainstream until quite late—I was at art school, and I found this whole world. That’s where I think that I started to find more exciting music that I could call my own.

HB: Now, jumping forward in time, I wanted to ask what it was like working on the “Dream Symbol” remix that you just put out with Loraine James.

JS: It’s just uncanny that you mention that song after your first question because that whole song is about my childhood home that I had for 21 years, and all this discussion about music all happened in that house—which is actually on the front cover with me and Nigel of the album Venus in Leo. So that’s the backstory of that song, a recurring dream about my teenage bedroom—like the one you’re in right now.

HB: That is interesting! Is there a reason you chose that song in particular for the new remix?

JS: It was Loraine James who chose Dream Symbol, and it’s very exciting to see what people choose from your back-catalogue. Dream Symbol was quite an unexpected choice. It’s not a hit, it’s a little bit under the radar, and she’s done a version that I love—especially when her vocals come in. We left her to it—she took Dream Symbol, and what she presented back to us we absolutely loved. There was no back and forth—it was just like, “That’s it, that’s perfect.”

HB: That must be really interesting for you and your fans to hear a new perspective on one of your tracks. And now, you’re both back in Melbourne from your European tour—how was that?

NY: The tour was great! We started off in Berlin, and the day of the show I caught something and couldn’t keep anything down, even a glass of water would make me throw up. I was like on my deathbed, and so managing to do the shows at the start of the tour I felt like the walking dead, but it actually made the shows quite exciting being so unwell. Jon was looking after me and making sure we got through it… it had a dramatic beginning.

JS: It seems to be a bit of a tradition that we start our European tour with extreme jet lag at Berlin Atonal or Globus. It’s just a really heightened, deranged club show that ruins us for the rest of the tour, basically [laughs]. But, it’s always worth it. The crowd in Berlin is just one of the most animated and exciting crowds that we play to so it’s such a great kicking off point. Nigel’s determination to do every show was something I’ve never seen before, and the shows were more exciting for it because every show felt like our last.

HB: And after the tour you opened up your Psychic 9-5 Club in Melbourne. What was your motivation behind the space, and how did you bring your vision to life?

JS: It’s a project very close to our heart in that the concept for it has existed for ten years—the motivation for the [Psychic 9-5] album was to make an alternative club space where you made better decisions, more meaningful friendships, less mistakes. There was an air of feminism about all of this as well, and both of us weren’t drinking alcohol at the time so it was a good excuse to reimagine a club without feeling bored. We were looking into these 80s Californian water bars and had a shared Tumblr, which was private only to each other where we collected reference of what this club might look like. For some reason, we got distracted and it never went ahead. Now—jump to ten years later—and we were able to bring it to life in a very meaningful and minimal way.

HB: I read an interview where one of you said that the hours between 9AM to 5PM are so often lost for people, so I think it’s interesting that the space made something more purposeful between those hours.

JS: It was exactly that, and the success of it was the random foot traffic. It was in the middle of Melbourne’s city centre, and there’s so many great memories of people’s weird expressions walking through the door and not knowing if they were welcome. Then, we’d offer them a free matcha and they’d sit down on their own and just bliss out. It definitely would have changed their days in a tiny little way.

HB: I’ve listened to a few of your NTS shows, and really enjoyed them. With all the negativity surrounding streaming sites, I personally think radio shows like this are going to be the future of music—I like how you can really get to know an artist’s inspirations and taste on a deeper level and see what music’s important to them. How has your experience been working on the show, and what are some of your most played tracks or artists?

JS: What I usually do is I go through some of my favourite underground record labels. Current inspirations is our theme, and I see what the latest things that they’ve been putting out. It’s an amazing way for me to keep discovering new music. Before we had the show, I didn’t have that ritual in my life and it’s been amazing even for having inspiration in writing our own music—just keeping up with what’s happening and getting excited about new music. We try to change it up each show, but I agree that there’s something so amazing about NTS and these radio shows in general compared to streaming—especially when there’s a bit of chit chat in between the songs as well and a little bit of information about the tracks people play. Myself and Nigel endeavour to be like that in the future, but we’re not quite there yet.

NY: What’s been cool about doing the show over a few years is that—because it is about what we’re currently into—you can kind of chart our change in tastes, which I think change pretty quickly. My Chinese horoscope is the goat, and one of its traits is that it’s quite fickle. When we were in the band with Sean, a former member of HTRK who passed away in 2010, his criticism of our music taste was that I was fickle. I’d bring him a track or an artist and he’d be like, “You’re not going to like that in six months.” He was so much more firm about his core influences.

HB: Each project you release does have such a unique and different shift in sound, but it still always sounds like HTRK. How has your preparation and process for creating an album has changed over the past two decades?

JS: It’s changed in some ways, but it’s definitely come full circle in other ways. One thing over the 21 years of our lives together is that we jam in person, and we really don’t file-share or anything like that. Our process of music—we were talking about yesterday—is that we have an amazing beginning, we have mad chemistry, we write a bunch of demos and get really excited, and then when we’re working on them a little bit more it’s like the dopamine leaves my body and I drop out of it for a couple of years and we go off on almost like another journey of life and experiences. Then, I get this flood of adrenaline and dopamine to finish the album all these years later with all these new influences that come in and completely shift the dynamic, and we finish an album. We only worked that out yesterday!

HB: I read that in the early days of the band, you used to create your music on drugs or by fasting to feel more present, and then later using different biohacking strategies. Is this something you’re still doing today?

JS: It’s a forever process that we’ve both shared in being interested in how to bodyhack the brain and the body for just having a bit of life and being better looking [laughs]. We’re constantly trying to do things like this—and it’s just simple things, like Nigel discovered this intense seven-minute workout where if you do it everyday you’re just ripped. It’s a constant practice that does leak into our music. I think the main thing—as we work more and more together—is that our music is our relationship, and so if we don’t have a relationship then we don’t have any more music to make. So, thankfully we have a really effortless relationship most of the time, and the main thing is to just hang out—that’s really the hack there now. To keep in each other’s lives and our families lives, it’s really simple sometimes.

HB: That’s really cool to hear band members feel that way about working together, and probably really comes through to your fans as well while listening. Looking back on the two decades you’ve spent in music, is there anything that you miss about the music industry in your early years as a band?

JS: We really miss incandescent lights on stage. Everything’s now LED and really cold—cold colours and cold atmosphere…

NY: And temperature. When did it change? Maybe ten years ago? Being on stage, performers are always so sweaty and hot, and that really gives something to the music. Nowadays you don’t get that! There was one show on tour that still had incandescents—this beautiful theatre in Marseille—and it was so nice to be playing under hot lights. We try to hang on to a lot of things from our early days that don’t change and aren’t affected by technological changes in the industry. Stuff like sending out t-shirts to fans directly or keeping in touch with fans by writing little notes or getting fan mail—all this stuff that’s like the dying side of the industry that makes it a real kind of labour of love. We were obviously fans of bands when we were younger, and sending away for a pin or a little merch item from halfway across the world is such a romantic thing and we want it to be a part of what we still do to keep that alive.

HB: That’s really special for an artist to keep in touch with fans like that. And for your fans, have you started writing new music yet or thinking about the direction the sound will take?

JS: We have so much new music—we have years worth of demos… don’t hold us to it, but it’s all going well. I think we’ll finish something quite soon.