In Capital’s ’80s-inspired EP, Fridays With Carol offered up 10 tracks of unadulterated feel-good grooves to lift your mood.
There’s a Melbourne pop duo named In Capital that we’d love you to know about. Their hook-fueled record Fridays With Carol blew us away with its effortless sounding glee and experimentation. From the dirty sax solos to the glistening synths, there’s a bop on this record for everyone.
Here’s how the boys (Cameron and Nick) did it, as well as a peek into their future plans. Take a look.
HAPPY: Hey there Nick and Cam! Whereabouts do you find yourself today?
IN CAPITAL: Nick’s currently in Jurien Bay, WA, at the tail-end of a four-month-long trip around Australia, and Cam’s doing laps in the car up and down Sydney Road, Brunswick, to send his eight-month-old son to sleep – two very different road trips, you might say!
HAPPY: In Capital… where did this name come from? How did your duo start?
IN CAPITAL: We formed at a Melbourne house party via a mutual friend, with a plan to head out of the city and record music. We didn’t know each other very well, but five days in the middle of nowhere making music together proved to be a super enjoyable and generous experience, so we become a band after that.
And as for the name! Haha, well, we were trying to think of something for months, and whenever one of us had an idea, we’d text it to the other in capital letters, to really emphasise it. We joked that it wasn’t an official band name pitch unless it was written in capitals. And so yeah, you can guess the rest!
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HAPPY: Massive congrats on the release of your album, Fridays With Carol. Tell us a bit about it.
IN CAPITAL: It’s really a 10-track hat-tilt to everything we love about music. Collectively we’ve spent hours lost in foot-stomping ’80s synthpop, rhapsodic chorus guitar-driven anthems, ear wormy toe-tapping pop numbers, and joyous festival bangers! So, this album is really an extension of the music that we love to listen to. It’s faintly familiar, nostalgic, but all-in-all still very much its own thing. And we’re really proud of it.
HAPPY: You guys recorded the album over two years during the Melbourne lockdowns… how did you manage to create such colourful, energy-bursting tracks during such dull times?
IN CAPITAL: As musicians (and this is probably true of any art form) we’re able to immerse ourselves in the creative process as a form of catharsis. Everything else outside of making this album was pretty much out of our control, so we really leaned into the process and that helped us block everything else out. It’s an eclectic album, so we were able to sink into the more emotive tracks with what we were genuinely feeling at the time, and then really tap into the joy of the upbeat tracks, just to pull us through.
HAPPY: What does the song making process look like for you having written, recorded, produced, and mixed everything yourselves?
IN CAPITAL: It can vary but, Nick will create sketches, one-to-two-minute pieces of music, and Cam will write little melodies or jot down some lyrics, and then we just feel it all out and see what sticks. This is usually when we head away and plonk ourselves somewhere in the Victorian countryside and work on the music together – guide vocals, song structure, additional musical parts. Then its final song structure, mixing, final vocal takes and BVs, and additional guest instrumentation – strings, sax, drums. Finally, mix, listen, mix, and listen!
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HAPPY: You mentioned that you let the songs “be what they want to be” and threw away this concept of perfection… was this a challenge? What advice would you have for artists on how to adopt such a laid back ethos?
IN CAPITAL: As a musician, you can beat yourself up over a bum note or a part that isn’t quite right. In the recording process, there are certain rules you aren’t meant to break. But in the end, we chose vocal and musical performances we were proud of or ones that had an energy that couldn’t be replicated over perfection.
Our advice would be do more with less, limitations often provide avenues to hone in on what you’re trying to create. Write with emotion and joy, let the music guide you, and if the songs are still hitting you in all the right places after two years of working on them, then hopefully other people might feel the same way about them, too!
HAPPY: Is this album different to your past work?
IN CAPITAL: Fridays with Carol is different to our past work in many ways, but ultimately that’s just down to the band progressing rather than us making a conscious choice to change our sound. And we’ve really embraced that. Whatever floods in creativity, we’ll see where it takes us. It’s liberating to create that way, rather than having to adhere to some sort of preconceived notion of what we should sound like or questioning whether something is or isn’t an In Capital song. At the end of the day, if we wrote it together then it absolutely is an In Capital song!
Also, our knowledge of the whole writing/recording process has grown, too. So our production has lifted and we’ve got a better understanding of what a song needs; or often, (and far more importantly) what a song doesn’t need/what to take out.
HAPPY: What can we expect in the future for In Capital?
IN CAPITAL: Melbourne permitting, shows! It’s been a while since we’ve played live but it’s a huge part of who we are as musicians. We can’t wait to get on stage and release this album live and to a crowd!
Fridays with Carol is out now.
