Te Ahi Top 10 | Pickle Darling

Taking out the top spot on last weeks Te Ahi Top 10 is Ōtautahi favourite Pickle Darling with their song ‘Blushing’. Taken from their recent album ‘Cosmonaut’, ‘Blushing is a touching song about the uncertainties of a budding relationship.

We caught up with Pickle Darling to chat about how the track came together, their recent tour and thoughts on the idea of bedroom pop.

Check out the interview below!

Kia Ora! Congrats on taking out the top spot on this week’s Te Ahi Top 10 with your song ‘Blushing’, can you tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do?

I am Lukas Mayo and I make ok songs!

‘Blushing’ is an incredibly sweet and charming track, what was the inspiration behind the song?

Thank you! It was actually the first song I wrote for this album and is loosely about the start of a relationship where you have all these worries and weird conversations you are trying to navigate and make sense of! Musically I think I was going for somewhere between Guided By Voices, Beach House, and Alex G!

Can you tell me more about your production process? How do you go about putting a song together?

I make the lyrics and music pretty independently from each other, and then I eventually find myself with notes full of lyrics with no music, and a bunch of music projects with no words. It takes me a while but I do a lot of mix and matching, trying to Frankenstein all these weird things together to make a song. I never actually sit down and compose a whole piece from scratch. I am kind of doing improv but the instrument I use to improvise on is the music editing software lol.

‘Blushing’ comes from your recently released album ‘Cosmonaut’, can you tell me a bit more about the album?

It is an album I am proud of and loosely is about a long-distance relationship, and I use a lot of sci-fi imagery in it. It charted in the NZ Top 40 at number 40 lmao!

You recently finished up a nationwide tour playing the album, how was that experience?

Fun and tiring! Never want to play shows again lol.

Your songs are quite stripped-back and have a lo-fi feel to them, how do you go about translating that sound to a live performance?

My live band is made up of me, Sarena Close, and Cameron Finlay. We don’t treat the recorded songs with any reverence and more as a launching point, to try and make things feel fun and lively and colourful. So lots of shakers and tambourines and synths and glockenspiel!

Bedroom pop is a label that’s been associated with your music, what do you think of that? Do you think genres are a bit redundant in this modern age of music?

I think everyone is kind of making bedroom pop in a way. It is kind of a redundant label because it either means lofi sort of DIY anti-folk stuff, or sad white people R&B. There’s also a lot of major label artists making ‘bedroom pop’ but they have ya know, millions of dollars of backing behind them. I definitely see myself more in the lineage of anyone making music in a DIY, untrained sort of way, whatever the genre happens to be! A bunch of my biggest inspirations are country artists, rap artists, folk artists, but it’s their DIY and fearless approach that inspires me. There is a lot of bedroom pop that I don’t necessarily feel that connected with.

I know you’ve just released an album and completed a nationwide tour, but, what does the rest of 2021 have in store for you?

Finishing my third album, and finishing up the soundtrack to a game called ShelfLife! 

You can check out ‘Blushing’ below.

As well as ‘Cosmonaut’.

The Te Ahi Top 10 is our weekly chart as voted by YOU, our audience! Presented live every Thursday 3 – 4pm on RDU 98.5FM. 

To vote for the Te Ahi Top 10 simply download the RDUnited app and click the like icon for a track you love when it’s played on air. The tune with the most likes each week will be crowned the winner! Simple as that.