"There's a lot of tension in the air," says Emily Kokal. The co-frontwoman of LA four-piece Warpaint isn't talking about band member dummy spits or the weariness that saw them almost part ways after three straight years of touring and recording. The band are due to fly to Brazil for a short whirlwind of shows squeezed in before their Australian visit later in February – and at the time of our interview, airports across the US are still packed full of protesters against the White House's executive order on immigration. "I wanna be informed and I wanna be aware of what's going on. But I also don't wanna just lose my whole day to, like, clicking on every little thing whether it's important or not, and just getting so distracted by it that it just makes me depressed. And then you don't really have energy to make art," says Kokal.
Warpaint make the ideal indie rock for an uneasy time. Languid and soothing, with its New Wave washes of dark guitars, there's also a persistent thread of late-night menace that runs through their three acclaimed albums: queasy, atonal flickers in the layered harmonies and slow-swooping guitar reverb to keep the listener on their toes. Their latest release, 2016's Heads Up, maintains the dreamy, elliptical quality of the band's earlier work while weaving in new elements: yacht-rock twang, twitching bedroom R&B; whispers, excursions that start in strutting Stones territory and spiral past the five-minute mark into a pulsing groove.
Kokal attributes the subtly heightened energy to a more scattered writing process, proximity-wise, that led to a more focused recording. After the success of 2009's Exquisite Corpse EP, then a couple of cycles of writing an album, touring it and then immediately regrouping to write a follow-up, the band found themselves in a creative rut – to the point where splitting up seemed a better option than settling in for another round of the same.
"I think that us getting to this place where nobody really wanted to do that same process, actually ended up being the best thing for the music," Kokal says. "Because when you're all in the room together, you can start picking apart everything, or doing anything anyone else is doing. So we kind of removed that process and it gave us this ability to allow each other to do what each person was feeling and not really nit-pick or talk about it too much."
Each band member had time on her own, writing or working on other projects. Bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg recorded a solo album; Australian drummer Stella Mozgawa was in demand as a session artist for other acts, including fellow Sydneysiders Jagwar Ma. Kokal taught herself how to use production and recording software. "Because I hadn't really learned that stuff and I felt really handicapped – on the self-titled album, other people were kind of able to work on songs that way. And I felt like I needed a producer, or other people, in order to get my ideas out. I felt really limited."
Every member, including Kokal, came to the recording session with a handful of solid ideas, instead of the whole band following one thread to a familiar place. "When you have a four-headed monster like our band, it, you can go down so many different paths with different ideas. And you lose that direct spark that you had initially by compromising … When you put yourself in a situation where you're like, 'I think that tree should be green', then there's gonna be three different opinions of, like, what colour it should be. But if somebody just shows up with a green tree, nobody cares."
They are about to unleash their nervy energy and muscular beats on the Sydney Opera House's enormous concert hall, but Kokal is confident they will find the same balance for their sound as they have in the personal dynamic. "It's a good challenge for us to be more sensitive to the space." But, she adds, it's Mozgawa's birthday that night, and the drummer's hometown crowd will hopefully not let the venue's grandeur hold them back. "We might have to have everybody stand up!"
Warpaint
Gig Saturday February 25, 9pm, Sydney Opera House
Tickets $39-$79, sydneyoperahouse.com
Live Shadowy, reverb-soaked indie rock
Best track: So Good, a swirling epic from Heads Up