You guys are a fairly new band, could you tell me the Twincest story from the beginning?
I used to go and see Hayley play in her last band Chaingang, and was so amazed by this powerful frontwoman, I wanted to put my own band together, I collected beautiful women and Creepers was born. I wanted to create a collective of powerful and inspiring women. It wasn't until Hayley and I met face-to-face at a show that our real story started. We had so many overlapping influences and similar attitudes and philosophies that starting a duo was an incredibly natural and organic thing.
Creepers and Chaingang played a show together in April, that ended up being Chaingang's final show. Hayley and I started hanging out in her bedroom and writing for Twincest a few months later.
How do you guys think your sound or your talents have evolved since then?
In absolute leaps and bounds because we've really sat down and taken the time to listen to ourselves and each other and realised exactly what we can create with our combined skills. Our production skills, songwriting and ability to make our concept visceral and real have grown with us over the past few months.
Where does the name come from?
I used to read a lot of fan fiction, and boy-on-boy was my favourite - so when Hayley suggested the name, I freaked out. It was so perfectly fitting for us, because we do look and feel like twin sisters, but we're both obsessed with this project and even each other. It makes total sense that I am in a project called Twincest. Check me out, tween me!
How would you describe your music to someone who hadn't heard it before?
It's like jungle meets punk - beats-based, with two powerful frontmen with different but complimentary vocal sounds.
How was it recording your first demo together?
A beautiful, fulfilling journey. We learned the ins and outs of self-production in a very trial-and-error way, but the process was incredibly fun and eye-opening for both of us. We're really hungry to keep improving our production skills. We started out jamming with a drummer in a rehearsal room, but realised it was more important to focus on creating our sound in Logic with the kind of layered arrangements you hear on our demos.
Do you guys have any rituals or specific methods for songwriting? How do your lyrics
usually come about?
By chance, we both owned a weirdo apocalyptic-themed book that we were conceptually inspired by. We pored over the novels and found interesting ways to put words together, and took inspiration from New Wave songwriting and dramatic lyrics. Lately, we have been endeavouring to write bold lyrics along the theme of empowerment and desire, and Hayley retelling the story of Saint Agnes from her Catholic primary school days kind of kicked off the theme for 'Saint'.
What are your thoughts about the position of women in music at the moment? Do you feel
any sort of pressure or expectations being an all-girl band?
I think it's great. We're all about female empowerment and stuff but it's not about division, it's about unity. We don't feel the need to be separated from men, we want beautiful boys and girls dancing to this shit, and being able to find the same joy in the music that we feel.
What are you guys excited about for the future?
2012 will be a year of opportunities, travel, sweaty video clips full of beautiful souls, and the continuation of creating the most fulfilling and honest music for us. It's purely a joy because it is the articulation of something we've never been able to grasp before.
