Girls in Hawaii are back with 'Nocturne'

Girls In Hawaii are back. On their new album Nocturne, they venture into the magic of the night.

NOT FROM HAWAII, AND NOT EVEN GIRLS!
No, they don’t wear hulas, and upon closer inspection, they are not even girls. The boys of Girls In Hawaii have roots in Walloon Brabant, specifically in the not particularly exotic town of Braine L’Alleud. Antoine Wielemans and Lio Vancauwenberghe found one another in the early 2000s through their shared love of indie-rock bands from the Pavement school.

The two frontmen were joined by their brothers Denis Wielemans on drums and Brice Vancauwenberghe on guitar, as well as Daniel Offerman on bass and keyboard. More recently, they added another keyboard player, François Gustin, who’s also famous for his tight tennis shorts. Following the recent departure of Boris Gronemberger, they now have a new drummer, Bryan Hayart.

The drummer will always have a special place with Girls In Hawaii. In late May 2010, Denis Wielemans’s life came to an abrupt end on the inner ring road in Brussels. The shock proved to be almost insurmountable for the band, but with the stunningly beautiful album Everest, the guys managed to pick themselves up and carry on three years later.

“The Everest is so huge that you can’t fathom it. Like death,” the band members told us back then. That same year, they celebrated their return to the stage with a heroic concert at Pukkelpop. “It was an incredible show, but a very difficult one to play,” Antoine Wielemans said during their performance at the festival this year, still visibly moved four years later.

THE GREAT RORSCHACH TEST?
They were sometimes called the “Walloon dEUS”, but we’ve always thought of Girls In Hawaii as more of a Walloon Grandaddy. Especially because, just like those American trucker hats, they sometimes soften their shadowy indie rock guitars with crackling electronica. In the early years it was still quite hesitant, but it gradually became more explicit. In the grimy synth stains of “Rorschach” on Everest, for example, you can clearly see their electronic future.

That future has now arrived on Nocturne, their new, fourth album, which is due at the end of September. The record is somewhat reminiscent of Radiohead circa Amnesiac, but also of the kitsch 1980s of cult singers Lio and the French electro popper Jacno. In “Guinea Pig”, you even hear Auto-Tune and a vague hip-hop beat, and you could easily dance to “Walk”. You read that right: not hula dancing, but grooving to a midnight disco beat.

Before their show at Feeërieën, Wielemans and Vancauwenberghe told us that they listened to a lot of hip hop and electronic music. “It is fascinating what rappers can express with a beat and some electronica,” Wielemans said. Previously, they had always worked with layers and lots of little details that usually took them months to create.

Now their work is much more spontaneous; they hit the recording studio with far fewer developed demos, and they let producer Luuk Cox do a lot of the finishing. These songs were finished in as short a time as possible: one day, maximum two. This enabled them to keep everything sounding purer, minimalist, without losing their essentials: the fragile, harmony singing that comforts lost souls wandering in the night.

FLUORESCENT ADULTS.
While on the cover of Everest, Girls In Hawaii expressed the troubled waters in which they found themselves with an ink black sea painted by the Belgian artist Thierry De Cordier, they have now opted for the colourful “night shots” of the British painter Tom Hammick. Painting is an important influence. While they made the album much in the way of Jackson Pollock – sloshing paint against a blank canvas and seeing what happened – they took hypnosis sessions and just worked with whatever came out to flesh out new themes.

Some songs nostalgically look back on a lost youth, others express the wisdom of adult life and the joys of young fatherhood. “It’s up on the hill that the view is the best so far,” as the song “Walk” nicely sums it up. As a result, Nocturne is a fascinating, mature record that manages to sound young at the same time. A record about “being alone in the heart of a night, about occupying private worlds seemingly lost in reverie, about us and that magical space of freedom the night can be.”

SEE THEM NOW BECAUSE THEY SOUND BETTER THAN EVER.
In the past, the Girls sometimes appeared onstage with an air of apology for being there, the voices of the two lead singers muffled away in the sound mix. But if you saw them during their recent show at the Feeërieën, you’ll know that this is a well-oiled live band, brimming with self-confidence and willing to take a risk – like they did while making the acoustic album Hello Strange, or Lio Vancauwenberghe experienced while making the soundtrack to the successful Walloon TV series Ennemi public.

“We’re still quite concentrated when we play because we’re performing many new songs and because we have a new drummer,” Wielemans emphasised. “But by our two shows at the AB in December, we’ll be completely fine-tuned.”

> Nocturne will be released on 29/09 (62TV Records)
> Artist Talk: Girls in Hawaii. 01/10, 16.00, Huis 23, Brussels
> Girls in Hawaii. 04/12 & 05/12, 20.00, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels