Louis XIV have been busy little campers – they’ve currently got time off for good behaviour during the making of their second album in order to tour Australia.

They’re working on the follow-up to The Best Little Secrets Are Kept like eager beavers, with the hope to have it finished by July. Writing and then recording in the studio, they do it all themselves – frontman Jason Hill produces and engineers the record, and the band have their own studio set up, which enables them to go in every day and, as he puts it, ‘fuck around’.

As such, there’s no pressure to conform – a lot more ideas can be explored as they’re doing it themselves, and they’re not beholden to a producer’s time nor the expense of working in a studio.

“The only time I’ve worked with a producer it really ruined the whole experience and the love and affection I have for recording, and finding new sounds and experimenting,” Jason outlines. “That’s what I fell in love with about records, and sometimes when you work with other people they have a rigid idea as to how things should be, and I tend to like to break all those rules.”

Growing up, Jason experimented with sounds – he had little tape machine and became fascinated that when you sped up the sound suddenly his voice was different, and when you slowed it down everything was different again. “It just turned me on so much more and I realised the power of recording something was so different to actually just documenting something; there’s a difference between putting up a microphone and documenting how something sounds in the room and making it totally different somehow.

So he ain’t no Steve Albini then.

“There’s [something] fascinating about it,” he says of recording. “It makes it more difficult too because the pressure is on us to do everything we do, and writing at home. It would be nice sometimes to have the luxury of being able to walk in, track this, then say ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’. But I couldn’t trust it, I couldn’t do it – every little aspect of our group we have to do, in terms of the artwork and in terms of this and in terms of that, and I certainly know how to do it, so why would it change now that we have some success?”

The songs themselves are sounding different to the band’s debut. “I think you always have to keep changing, otherwise you get bored,” he says. “You can change for better or for worse, but I think the thing is you certainly want to do something different. There’s a moment that’s somewhat similar in one song, but we’re doing a lot more vocal things – a lot more eerie, darker things, and a lot more strings and a lot more experimenting sonically too. It’s darker, topically, but it’s a darker world that we live in, but there’s not so much the sex that was apparent on the last one. But that was the place I was in in my life, and you have to write what’s true in your life, and when you find yourself getting in trouble with certain people about what you’re writing then that’s when you know that you’re writing the right thing. That’s what I did on the last record – I wrote about things like having a mistress, and those sorts of things I have to write about. You have to write about what’s real, otherwise it doesn’t turn me on.”

Leaning in more political directions, Jason outlines that a song written for the debut, called “More Than Bombs”, was one that didn’t see release in America, but that may be considered for the follow-up. “I didn’t want it to be on the record because I wanted it to be a bit of escape from that in some sort of way,” he says of America’s warring ways. “It is a bit more touchy and about truths and how people form relationships, but less about man-woman relationships and more about where they find themselves in the world an in relation to everybody else in the world. All the songs haven’t been written, so I’m still waiting for other songs to come that may alter my opinion of the record, but so far it’s heavier.”

He agrees that, sometimes, it can be beneficial for Louis XIV to record songs and then have the opportunity to play them live and road test the material. “We were in the studio for several months and you get in a different place. There’s a piano in my house and I sit around and play the piano more than I play the guitar, which is strange because there’s all these songs I’ve written where we really can’t do anything with them live. Half of this record that we have now I don’t have any idea as to how we’ll play live. But I don’t let that stop us – my favourite records, like the Beatles records, they couldn’t play live anyway but I still love those albums.”

Given that he’s self-producing, you wonder whether it’s sometimes hard to determine when a song is completed and whether he’s ever 100% happy with it. “You have to be able to step back from yourself a bit,” Jason says. “I’m the biggest critic of our stuff, more so than probably anybody, but I’m also one of the biggest fans too. I constantly find myself with the rest of the guys loving something and me not thinking it’s up to snuff or losing interest in it. We write so many songs and we’re always recording this and that that there’s so many places that we try not to have any limits as to where we can go, but at the end of the day you still want to have a record that you think sounds like a record, not just a collection of some weird songs that have no connection with one another.”

Louis XIV’s The Best Little Secrets Are Kept is out now, with the band touring Australia. Dates:
June 15th: The Zoo, Brisbane
June 16th: Hi Fi Bar, Melbourne
June 17th: Home, Sydney