A CONVERSATION WITH: DRAX PROJECT

We caught up with Sam and Matt from Kiwi supergroup Drax Project to chat through each track of their new EP ‘Diamond’! They tell us all about working with Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter Rogét Chahayed (‘SICKO MODE’, Drake, Doja Cat), living in Adele’s old house, how stoked they are to finally release ‘Hollywood’ and more.

HYPE: Thanks so much for taking the time to chat! How have you guys been?

Sam: Great to get some music out again!

HYPE: Absolutely! I saw you guys do the All Black half-time performance as well, that must have been pretty sick!

Matt: Yeah, that was like 5 minutes and we just had to smash through 4 songs. Just the best stuff.

Sam: We got the scary stuff out of the way first though (laughs)

HYPE: (Laughs) I love how they had all 4 of you on one mic!

Sam: We actually had this hilarious comment “when you mum says you have to bring your little brothers with you” (laughs).

HYPE: (Laughs) Yeah, it was an awesome performance! I’ve had a listen to the EP and it sounds so amazing. What was your mindset going into this EP and the music that you wanted to create?

Sam: It’s a mixture of things that we’ve been working on over the past two or three years, some as long as we’ve been in the band. A bunch of the songs were written when we were in LA - one of them was written on the same day that we wrote ‘Catching Feelings’ with SIX60 so that was quite a long time ago. They’re just a collection of songs that we’ve been trying to work out and get right for a while. Other than ‘Mad At You’ - that one came pretty recently and was pretty quick to be finished - but the rest of them are all songs that we really love and didn’t want to put out unless they were 100% what we wanted. So, we kinda feel like now, that’s what we’ve got to.

Matt: Feels quite nice releasing a body of work. We’ve been doing singles for the past two years - building up to the one single and it’s out in the world. Now we’ve got a bunch of songs - we haven’t had this feeling since the album since 2019 so it’s quite nice. A nice change.

HYPE: Yeah as you said, with the fast pace that music is moving at the moment, you do see artists release a lot of singles, so it must be nice to actually have that collection of work with an EP, which is becoming more common. I’m sure it’s also nice to release music as you’re creating it rather than waiting for that full album because that can take a while.

Sam: We’re wanting to have more regular releases, which obviously you know, if you’re working up to an album that’s twice the amount of songs than what would be on an EP, so often people have interim EP’s between albums. We’ve got an album that we’re working on at the moment so this is us getting back into things, and then after this we’ll be going for the album.

HYPE: Exciting! So I see the EP name is ‘Diamond’ - how did you land on that name?

Matt: It was the 20 odd options we came up with (laughs). The funny thing with us is because there’s 4 of us, it takes a while to get to a creative decision a lot of the time. So how we did it was pretty mechanical and methodical. What we’ve been doing recently is pick your top 4, and the best idea that you like gets 4 points, the next one gets 3, the next one gets 2 etc. And then you collate the scores, and the one with the most points wins. We run a very strong democracy (laughs). But yeah, ‘Diamond’ was our favourite name out of all those options.

Sam: Yeah, once we decided it was one of the top options, it was cool because these songs have been made over a long period of time which obviously, diamonds take a long time to be made underneath the ground, and there’s been a lot of pressure over the last few years with everything that’s been going on, it’s been pretty crazy. We think it’s this really cool, brilliant sparkly thing that’s been created in this situation of pressure.

Matt: And also diamond means 10x platinum so that is the goal! (laughs).

HYPE: (Laughs) Love that you’re manifesting it! That’s awesome! Interesting what you were saying about having lots of people to make a decision, lots of cooks in the kitchen, so sometimes it’s hard to make those creative decisions. But you’ve got a great strategic way of working that out!

So the EP is so amazing - super groovy, JT vibes, funky and you’re really delving into that Drax Project sound which is really epic! I’d love to go through the EP track by track. First off, it’s ‘Crazy’ - from the Q&A you guys did with us last time you mentioned that you worked with iconic duo Grey on this track who’s written the smash hits ‘The Middle’ by Maren Morris, Zedd & Grey as well as ‘Starving’ by Hailee Steinfeld, Zedd and Grey. What was it like working with Grey on that track, and how did you create the song?

Sam: It was really good - it was a song that they had already worked on, the brothers who are Grey, this guy Cory Enemy, and a writer called Ben Somama. So they had this idea for a song, we got sent it, and honestly it was the first time that we’d ever had a situation like this where we’re sent a song and then we’re like “okay actually we like this enough to work on it” and to try flesh it out, rather than us all being there at the start of the song. It was a little bit of a different process, and obviously we weren’t physically there with them because they were in the States and we’re over here. So we did some Zoom calls and recorded some parts and wrote some lyrics on it.

Matt: They’re a super talented team and we’re big fans of their music already so we were definitely really excited when they sent it through. It sounded super crispy, high energy and it fits with our style so yeah. We took it on and touched it up - it’s a real fun one to play live.

HYPE: Yeah I bet! That’s so sick! And the next track on the EP is ‘Fashion Sense’ - such a great groove and the melodies in that one are so unreal. How did this song come about?

Matt: Appreciate it! Yeah that one was written a few years ago now back in LA before everything went crazy. That was the most people in one room we’ve ever had when writing a song - we had the two boys from Some Randoms, we had Sam Fischer from Australia who wrote “This City”, we had Rogét Chahayed who’s done ‘Sicko Mode’, ‘Say So’ and Drake - just a crack team of people! And all four of us in there. So anyway, there was about 300 people in this room, absolutely vibing.

Sam: What happened was like, I think Ben started playing some guitar chords maybe, and then Rogét started playing some chords on the piano.

Matt: And then someone had a beat going and we were all jumping around.

Sam: Danny, who works on mainly doing beats, and Matt was playing some crazy synth bass stuff, and then we were all just getting into lyrics and melodies. It was just like a party.

Matt: You can tell for us when we talk about songs, we’re very into the technical and music side of it! That was a really fun song to make and really fun song to play. We ended up putting in a bit of a guitar solo at the end which we don’t do often. The only other time we’ve had a guitar solo was our first ever officially released song - which will not be named (laughs).

Sam: No one needs to find that (laughs).

Matt: We love all five songs, but ‘Fashion Sense’, if we did our ranking system, would probably get the most likes.

HYPE: Nice! It must be a great feeling to have that energy in a room full of talented people who are the best in the industry, wanting to make the best music possible. Pretty unreal!

Matt: For sure!

HYPE: ‘Mad At You’ is the next song - really love the chill, laid-back vibes of this one. Definitely the tune that gets stuck in my head the most! What was the process of writing this one?

Matt: This was quite an interesting one. Again, with the technical process, it started off with me going through our old phone recordings and voice notes, and I found one deep in the vault from Shaan that he recorded on his phone a few years ago - it was him singing the melody of the chorus. Which kind of sounded like Adam’s family (laughs).

HYPE: When you say that now, that’s what it reminds me of actually! (Laughs)

Matt: So hopefully we don’t run into any legal issues with that (laughs). But ended up taking that voice note, made a little beat to it, brought it in to the boys, so the four of us were there and we had another amazing songwriter with us over Zoom - her name’s Maddy Simmen. And we ended up cooking it together - fully self-produced that one.

Sam: And all of us in our studio in Wellington.

Matt: Yeah, so over the last couple of years we haven’t been able to do much travelling and shows and stuff, so we kinda kept everything in-house, we got better at producing and now we feel like we’re at the stage where we’re confident with making a song from scratch. And over the years, we’ve got all the equipment we need. So yeah, we’ve just been knuckling down with that. It’s also a nice change in the EP - third song, so you’ve got the high energy ones and then dip it down for a bit, and as we’ll talk about soon, bring it back up.

HYPE: Nice, yeah what you’re producing is world-class so you must be pretty proud of yourselves to get to this point.

Matt: Appreciate it, thanks!

HYPE: ‘Love in the Morning’ is next - super funky, and I also love the background noise which makes you feel like you’re at a party. How did you create this song?

Sam: That was probably one of the last sessions we did when we were in LA in 2019 before we came back to New Zealand. We were working with these two guys Tay Dex and Wes Singerman, and the house that we were staying in there was one of those houses that could have been on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (laughs) or something like that. But yeah, we really wanted to do a song that was really really leaning into the early 2000’s JT kind of aesthetic, and I feel like the whole situation was pretty conducive to that.

Matt: The cool thing about that house, it was in Beverly Hills - it feels weird talking about it but looking back now it’s like “we really did that, that was amazing!”. We were living in Beverly Hills, we had a 10 ft waterfall, it was ridiculous, Adele lived there at some point.

Sam: Scott Storch, who wrote ‘Still D.R.E.’ and stuff - it was his old house and we wrote this song in his old bedroom (laughs).

Matt: Yeah like you said with the party vibe and stuff, that’s us in his room all just talking. I think you can hear me going “it’s all good bro” in my monotone voice (laughs). But yeah, it’s a super fun one and those boys killed it on production. They’re part of the same team that Rogét built together with the Some Randoms guys from ‘Fashion Sense’ and a few more that we’re working on.

HYPE: Amazing! Where abouts are you guys based at the moment? Are you between LA and NZ?

Sam: We’re pretty much just staying in New Zealand at the moment. We did a little trip to Aussie for a couple of weeks and did some sessions over there, and we’ll probably be going backwards and forwards from there. But I don’t think that we’ll move full-time back to the States, I think we’ll probably go back whenever we need to do work and as that comes up. But for the moment, and like what Matt was saying, we’ve kinda built a situation as much as we can of being as self sufficient as we can. So now it’s more of a choice when we want to travel and when we want to go places. New Zealand’s great.

HYPE: Yeah, now with the border’s opening up, you can easily work with people overseas now and nowadays you can really make a track from anywhere in the world which is sick.

Alright last track - ‘Hollywood’. You’ve been holding onto this one for a while! I’ve heard it a couple of times live and it’s incredible. I’m sure it’s great to finally get this one out!

Matt: Wow, this one is probably the best story on the whole EP. We wrote this one the same day that we wrote ‘Catching Feelings’ and ‘Sidebit’. This was at Marlon’s house from SIX60, a good 5 years ago now. We’ve been playing it live at every show since that day, so I’d say a couple of hundred times we’ve played the song (laughs). And never really got the production or the recording right over those years. We had a few goes at it, but I think we’ve finally cracked the code on ‘Hollywood’.

Sam: It’s a broken record situation here (laughs) but I think we also knew what we wanted it to sound like, but we just couldn’t communicate that to who we were working with to really get it on point. So I think that being able to do our own stuff has kind of facilitated getting that song out there. It was really about capturing that live energy.

Matt: It’s a really weird one having a song that a lot of our fans already know. It feels like we’re not dropping this surprise brand new song. It feels like it’s so old, but the recording is brand new (laughs). Every time I hear it I’m still just like “wow, I really like this!” (laughs). We’re really happy with the mix of it - there’s a lot going on. Synths going, all those drums going, bass - Sam’s going nuts on it. Our mix engineer, he’s amazing - his name’s Tom Norris. We met him through the Grey guys. So yeah, I guess we’ll be playing this one for another five years at least.

HYPE: (Laughs) Amazing! It’s such an epic way to end the EP! You kill it every time I’ve heard it live, and I guess it’s quite hard to get that to translate to a recording. Great job, you’ve nailed it for sure!

Matt: Thank you!

HYPE: What would you say were your main highlights working on the EP?

Sam: Great question! I think ‘Fashion Sense’ was one of the moments where we walked out of that session and we all kind of said to each other that we thought it was one of the best songs, if not the best song, that we’ve written. And working with someone like Sam Fischer as a lyricist and topliner - it was really cool to work with someone who’s at such a high level, and to help get our ideas out with somebody like that was just an awesome experience. I think we all learnt a lot from that as well. Also writing ‘Love In The Morning’ - it’s a great memory for all of us of that time.

Matt: Yeah those were actually my main two. I think for me personally, it’s maybe a little bit of a selfish reason which I don’t like to be, but I really liked the ‘Mad At You’ process. For the first time, my voice is actually on one of our songs with that intro! That’s quite a fun thing for me anyway.

HYPE: Yeah, absolutely! That’s awesome! Well that’s all my questions for you - thank you so much for taking the time to chat and congrats on the EP!

Matt: I just wanted to say thanks for your support over the years.

Sam: Yeah, we appreciate it!

Matt: I’ve seen all of the shares and all of the comments and all that stuff.

HYPE: Of course, no problem! You guys are absolutely smashing it.

Sam: It’s just good to get things moving again. It’s a step to the album as well so I think that’s what we’re excited about. Just moving forward. We’re trying to get it done by the end of the year, hopefully that will happen.