Originally published in Spook Magazine, April 2015
Daniel Johns has always been a chameleon. For 20 years he’s been testing the limits of what being “the guy from Silverchair” can mean, wandering through diverse sonic landscapes; from grunge, to orchestral rock, to surrealist pop. He’s had some missteps and some moments of absolute genius. Now at 35, he’s found a new sound. A sound that’s unexpected, but that somehow feels right.
Released last month, the Aerial Love EP is fifteen minutes of smoky, slow-burning sound, chartering surprisingly soulful new waters. This is a guy who once said he wanted to come back in his next life as a piece of plankton shaped like a marble so he could roll along the seabed and pick up what he sees fit. And that’s essentially what he’s always done – taken inspiration from here, influence from there, some strange idea from somewhere else entirely, and mashed it into something new.
Aerial Love is lightyears from the dramatic and complex sound Johns has become known and much loved for. These four R&B-inspired tracks are sensual and restrained – breathy vocals and astonishing falsetto, backed by gently pounding beats and synths. The lyrics are pared back but confessional, sifting through love and loneliness and desire and new beginnings. It feels adult and resolved, and it demands to be taken more seriously. And it’s pretty much the smartest move he could have made.
I should preface all of this with a disclaimer: in my sixteen-year-old mind, Daniel Johns and I were soul mates. It’s a classic story. I was a depressed teenager, living under a permanent black cloud: a relentless ache in my chest, spores of misery colonising all around me. Then here was this guy with a guitar who seemed so different to the type of masculinity I’d been taught to think was desirable. He was soft-spoken and gentle; an outsider singing about things that made sense to me in a way that the more popular music of the time didn’t. I wrote his lyrics all over my books, my arms, my English essays, and it made me feel like maybe I wasn’t so crazy and alone.
It’s been eight years since Johns last put out a record. If he was ever going to release new music, he had to do something bold. Reinventing yourself, though, is a delicate art – just ask Taylor Swift. When we see an image of someone that jars with the images we’ve already formed of them, there’s a cognitive dissonance that makes us uncomfortable. It makes us question their authenticity; we’re quick to accuse them of pretending to be something they’re not, or of losing sight of who they really are. The assumption is that we know other people better than they know themselves. Which, obviously, is pretty silly.
Earlier this year Johns described the song ‘Aerial Love’ as “a reset button; a palate cleanser”. On the one hand, maybe the best way to approach this new music is to forget everything you know about him to date. Take it as it is, pretend he’s a new artist you’d never heard of. But on the other hand, context is important. It’s when you listen to the EP as part of a musical evolution as a whole that it becomes more interesting and starts to make complete sense.
Reinventing yourself, though, is a delicate art – just ask Taylor Swift. When we see an image of someone that jars with the images we’ve already formed of them, there’s a cognitive dissonance that makes us uncomfortable
Let’s go back to 1994, when Daniel Johns was a sarcastic blonde fifteen-year-old, who looked like a baby Kurt Cobain and growled like him too. He and his two best mates from school, Ben Gillies and Chris Joannou, had started a grunge band just for something to do. They sent a cassette tape in to a demo competition, and pretty much overnight, everyone knew who they were. The next year, Frogstomp became the first debut album by an Australian artist to enter the ARIA charts at number one.
Frogstomp is what many people consider “pure” Silverchair – their real, authentic sound. For these sorts of fans, everything the band released since has been a betrayal of that. It’s a good record; there’s a lightness and simplicity to it that is still appealing, even now that grunge is so over. Their 1997 album Freak Show was similar, but heavier and angrier. It was also a little more experimental – sitars and timpani mashed up with punk influences. The lyrics were saturated with cynicism and self-loathing: “Couldn’t care less if I died right now/ Who am I?/ I don’t know, you tell me/ You seem to know everything else.” But there was something unnerving in Johns’ screams. He wasn’t just putting on the Cobain thing anymore.
By the time the Freak Show tour wrapped up, Johns had retreated deeper into sickness and obsession. For the next year, he hid away in a house alone with his dog. He was nineteen, depressed and anorexic; he nearly starved himself to death. Neon Ballroom, released in 1999, expresses all that bleakness and anxiety nakedly. It’s the first album Johns wrote without his band mates, and it’s here that he really started to find a unique voice as an artist. The dramatic opening track, ‘Emotion Sickness’, sums up the feeling of the record best: orchestral peaks and crashes, a frantic ticking beat, spooky piano trills, tired murmurings that grow into ravaged screams.
While Neon Ballroom was Silverchair’s darkest point, Diorama (2002) took that orchestral rock sound and brightened it, made it technicolour. It’s confident and resolved, with a powerful drive. The boys were 23 years old and the album was hailed as a comeback. In some ways though, it was a finale.
Which brings us to that limbo period, where a lot of people started to think Johns had lost it. He was happy and exuberant, and that seemed weird to people. He got closer to his old buddy Paul Mac and they released an electronic pop album full of sunny melodies and sweet, bizarre lyrics. In 2007, Silverchair released one more album, the camp and vibrant Young Modern. The record was pure pop, lush with surrealist imagery, but on the whole it lacked something. For a while, Johns adopted an alter ego called Sir Whilliam Hathaway, a 19th century English dandy/statesman who liked to be addressed as Whil. He was drunk and stoned a lot.
And then eight years went by. He’d show up occasionally, in a fashion spread inRUSSH with his then girlfriend, model Louise van de Vorst; in a video for the Sydney Opera House singing a few lines of Nick Cave’s ‘The Ship Song’; writing the score for a ‘cinematic modern musical’ by Josh Wakely; writing for a diverse bunch of artists, from 360 to Kimbra to the Veronicas.
Mostly though, he seemed to be laying low. There had long been talk of a solo album, but I don’t think anyone really thought it was going to happen.
But now he is back, with Aerial Love in tow. This new work is the result of four years spent messing around with sounds, with no intention of ever releasing anything again. “It was basically just a big four-year protest,” he recently told Triple J. “It went really brutal for a while; I don’t even know if it was music. Just avoiding writing anything with any kind of structure, just lots of distortion and drum machines – just noise.
“I started to feel like there was an expectation from people as to what I was allowed to release,” he said. “Silverchair came with a lot of expectations… With this release it felt like I’d been given a ticket to freedom, and that I could write whatever the fuck I wanted.”
He collaborated with an eclectic lot to make it happen – from New Zealand producer Joel Little, to electronic hip-hop duo Damn Moroda, to award-winning Australian producer Styalz Fuego. Together, they’ve created a sound that can’t be neatly defined. It’s soulful, stirring and undeniably sexy. In the simplest terms, it’s just good pop music.
As for the full album, coming later in the year? Who really knows. Johns told Indie Shuffle, “To anyone that expects anything, I’d say just to let those expectations go, because it’s probably not what you think it’s going to be.”
And with everything we know about Daniel Johns, that sounds like pretty good advice.