Phoebe Rings is an Auckland, NZ-based dream pop band. Their latest record, Aseurai, is out now on Carpark.
Crystal Choi and Ben Locke are the keyboardist/vocalist and bassist, respectively, for the Auckland-based dream pop band Phoebe Rings; Liz Stokes is the lead singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist for the also-Auckland-based band The Beths. Phoebe Rings just put out their latest record, Aseurai, last week on Carpark, so to celebrate, Crystal, Ben, and Liz got on a Zoom call to catch up about it, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Crystal Choi: Oh, you’re in LA?
Liz Stokes: Mhm. Sun’s shining. Just kidding, it’s not. It’s kind of cloudy. How are you guys?
Crystal: We’re doing really great.
Liz: Where are you at in your lead up to the album coming out? Have you got two, three singles out?
Crystal: Yeah, we’ve got one more single to be out.
Liz: Can I know what it is?
Crystal: It’s “Fading Star. Alex [Freer] wrote it.
Liz: Oh, cool! Is there a video for that one?
Crystal: Yeah, there is a video for that one. People actually act in the video, and everyone’s really amazing.
Ben Locke: Yeah, people pretending to be office workers.
Liz: You guys used to work in an office together, right?
Crystal: Yeah, we did.
Ben: Everyone apart from Simeon [Kavanagh-VIncent].
Liz: Do you feel like your experience of working in an office together was influencing the performance?
Ben: There’s that part when I walked up to Alex’s desk and and berated him, which is just what it was like working together. I would always just crack the whip and give Alex a hard time. That’s classic Ben Locke management style.
Crystal: [Laughs.] It was completely the opposite. Also, we definitely weren’t all in gray suits. But still, everyone was great at acting. Actually, Simeon, because he didn’t work in an office — he looked too cool. He had a pearl necklace…
Ben: Didn’t know how to wear the drudgery.
Liz: You would have shut that down, Ben.
Crystal: We saw the new Beths music video as well.
Liz: That was for the song “Metal.” We actually shot that at Ben Locke’s family’s… what do you call that? It’s a farm?
Ben: Yeah, they do grow things and have animals and stuff, but it’s like a recreational farm.
Liz: We’re very grateful. It was absolutely pissing down with rain and I heard we nearly depleted the solar power, because we were all soaking wet and I ran a hairdryer to dry off some of our pants. I didn’t realize how powerful hairdryers are, I guess.
Ben: Yeah, when you’re on solar panels, you really notice which things really suck the power, like toasters.
Liz: Kettles.
Crystal: Yeah, kettles are real powerful.
Liz: I love turning kettles on. I don’t even want tea, I just want to put the kettle on… I’m just kidding, I didn’t do that. But I do drink a lot of tea, so the kettle is going a lot. [Laughs.]
Crystal: I remember when I used to rent in this dingy downstairs place with my mum, the power was a little bit dodgy and when I put the kettle and toaster on at the same time, the power would go off.
Liz: I feel so spoiled. It’s like, here I am making toast at the same time as making a cup of tea in the morning without even thinking about the drain on the national grid… Anyway, this is mostly what the interview will be about, right?
Ben: Yeah. Anyway, kettles — what rhymes with “kettle”? Your new song, “Metal.”
Liz: [Laughs.] What’s the latest song that you put out? That’s your song, Ben, with the car music video?
Ben: Yeah.
Liz: How did you make the music video?
Ben: I made it using Blender and the video software editing thing that TikTok makes — I can’t remember what it was called.
Liz: CapCut.
Ben: Yeah, that’s the one!
Liz: [Laughs.] I’m familiar.
Ben: It was fun. The Blender side of it was a huge learning curve, but also really satisfying and fun to play with. I just completely underestimated how long it was going to take, so I was editing it while I was on the plane back to New Zealand, piecing it all together, just because I had run out of time and was rendering it up ‘til the last minute.
Liz: Well, it turned out really good. What’s to do with that song? What’s it about?
Ben: The kind of seed of it comes from a line from The Matrix when Trinity’s being chased and and she’s like—
Liz: “There is no spoon.”
Ben: Yeah. It was just that notion of having this internal discussion with yourself and telling yourself to get up and overcome come the irrational part of your brain that just wants to stand there and, I don’t know, probably die. And then relating that to personal experiences with mental health and expanding on that theme.
Liz: Oh, that’s so cool. I didn’t realize that. I think I’d kind of taken it at — you know, you hear a dance-y beat and someone talking about, “Get up, let your body take the lead,” and you’re like, This is a song about dancing.
Crystal: I thought so as well. And then you talked about Trinity, and I was like, “Oh, right, The Matrix.” But then I didn’t know the whole mental health aspect of it, although we were performing it. And now when I’m singing BVs, it feels different.
Liz: You should do a Matrix themed outfit for one of your gigs.
Ben: Yeah, I was trying to make us into Matrix characters for the music video, but I didn’t quite get there. Next time.
Crystal: You totally did!
Liz: So, you wrote this one, Alex wrote the next one that’s coming out, and I know you write probably the bulk of the songs, Crystal. Is that true?
Crystal: I think partly true. We tried to really divide the role this time. Ben wrote two songs, Simeon wrote a couple of songs, and Alex wrote a couple of songs, and I wrote the rest. It did end up being pretty balanced, actually. And it’s been a huge weight off my shoulders. It’s been great.
Liz: I’m such a gremlin about songwriting. I’m so protective of my own songs. In the very early days of the band, I think Jonathan [Pearce] had a song and our old drummer had a couple of songs in the set, and then since then, for some reason we’ve just stuck to just my songs, and that feels like an integral part of the band. Was it something that you guys had to talk about, or that is ongoing? How do you have conversations about which songs you play? Does it all feel pretty obvious, in terms of someone brings a song and it’s just like, “Oh, well, this one’s great. We’re gonna learn this one.”
Crystal: I think we did have a conscious conversation about sharing the songwriting role before doing this album. It’s not that I’m not protective of my songs too, and we definitely don’t write the songs from scratch together. Because I think that is a bit of a sanctuary place that I don’t really want to share. [Laughs.] So we try and write the songs as complete as possible, and then we bring it and arrange things together. It sounds lazy, but filling the whole album just by myself — it’s 10 or so songs, and it seemed like a large amount and I’m not the fastest songwriter. I take ages to write a song. But then I was in this very lucky place where I did like all the solo projects that all the band members did, so I trusted that and decided to share the load.
But also, it is a bit of an evil scheme because I wanted the band members to stay in the band. If you have original contributions and your own creative input, you’re going to feel more attached, so you won’t leave.
Liz: That’s so sneaky! But, yeah, that’s so nice when you have a band where everybody is an experienced songwriter with a lot different projects.
Crystal: Yeah. If I didn’t like your writing, then I wouldn’t have asked. [Laughs.] Our EP was all songs written by me, but it did set a bit of a sonic template for us. So I think when the rest of the band were writing, they did have the Phoebe Rings sound in mind. Is that right, Ben?
Ben: Yeah, definitely. Trying to head towards a particular destination.
Liz: That feels pretty important, like a mission statement. How do you tell if something feels like Phoebe Rings or not?
Crystal: I did want to have an indie band when I was starting the project. I didn’t want my jazz experience to be too affecting the music — although it inevitably does, in some kind of way. But also at the time, I just got into synths and started exploring different kind of synth sounds. But I think an integral part of my writing is, even from when I was very young, I loved… I don’t know if it’s a sound or just a feeling, but when something is very ethereal and up in the air and dreamy. That atmosphere could be felt through movies or paintings or whatever. I always felt that through impressionistic music, for example. Or when I see the color emerald, I just feel this thing… Ben is laughing now.
Ben: No, that’s so lovely, and it’s so true! The music’s not super direct and it does have this kind of watercolor-y-ness to it. And I was just thinking about the synth sounds — they’re usually very warm and bubbly. There’s a particular palette that I think you’re alluding to.
Liz: Totally. I know what you mean — you feel very vague saying it, but I’m like, Yeah, that sounds right. There’s a vibe. It’s interesting that you point to visual things as well as audio. It’s like all of the senses.
Ben: What about you? Do you have books or anything that you feel are similar to your songwriting?
Liz: I don’t know. For us, that kind of, “what are we,” I feel like was way more sonic. I never think of myself as a visual person; it’s something that I’m learning, all of these things to do with visual art and design, and even movies and stuff. It’s not something I ever felt really strongly about in the same way that I do with music. With The Beths, it just felt more like we had a big playlist. It was like, “I think I know what I want us to be, and I can’t exactly find it, but I can find this collage of things that I like sonically.” At the time, it was Weezer guitars and a deadpan vocal and verbose lyrics that are a bit funny. Way too many words and silly rhymes. It felt more like a jigsaw puzzle of sounds rather than a vibe. I feel like the vibe came after, and that’s been a nice collaborative thing of just us being who we are, playing the music. I feel a lot more confident that, just in the four of us touching our instruments and making something together, there’s something in that that innately makes it Beths music as we start to branch out from the first box was that we kind of put ourselves in.
Ben: You talked about verbose lyrics, and I just wanted to talk about how you used the word “florid” in the new song. [Laughs.]
Liz: Yeah. [Laughs.] And?
Ben: I was looking at the lyrics to that and I was like, Florid? What does that mean? And I was like, Have any other songs ever used the word florid? I was going through the list of other songs that I know, and there’s lots of “Florida”s. And then it would be like, “The Great Gatsby and David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster use the word ‘florid.’”
Liz: There’s my peeps!
Ben: Yeah. Very incredible use of a very specific word.
Liz: It just felt right. It’s like wearing the clothes of the song. You know, when you’re talking about something being over the top, complex, you’re like, “Well, the words should be complex.” And — I don’t know if this is opening the curtain too much — when I am writing songs, I do spend a decent amount of time on Thesaurus.com. It’s practical though, because you have an idea of what the idea is, but you’re like, “Well, now I have to put it into a sentence.” And for me, I like it to rhyme. So you’re rejigging stuff and rejigging stuff and there’s a million different ways to phrase the same idea.
So, yeah, “a florid orchestration” — which, I also spent an embarrassing amount of time recording it. In the back of my head I was like, It sounds kind of like I’m saying the word “castration” at some point. But I’m not. It’s “a florid orchestration.”
Ben: Yeah, you really want to get that one right.
Liz: You want to enunciate. But thank you for noticing the words. For me, words are a real play zone, where I feel like I can play around and I’m allowed to do freaky shit.
Ben: They’re a lot more flexible than harmony.
Liz: I feel really hamstrung in harmony. I have my things that I do and my places that I go, and I feel like the way for me to get out of that would be to learn a lot of songs harmonically, to learn the chords to a bunch of songs. Because every time I do learn a new song, I’m like, “Oh, you can do that.” And then you do it.
Crystal: When it comes to words, I’m exactly the opposite. I’m like, Oh, my gosh, I need to study lyrics and learn my way to write. And for harmony, I’m fine.
Liz: But your lyrics are so great! The thing for me is, I use a hundred words to say something that you could say in five. Sometimes I hate myself that I can’t say it in five words — and I feel like you can say it in five words. Your song ideas and your lyrics are very strong and very clear. There’s a clarity about what the emotion is, and it blends so well with the song. It feels complete. It doesn’t feel like it’s like slapped on.
Crystal: Thank you very much. I love your lyrics, please don’t hate yourself. I just remember when we were in Melbourne together and we were in the audience, and we were just amazed at how, yes, there were lots of lyrics, but everyone was singing along to all of them word by word really loud. It was very special.
Liz: It’s a good feeling. I’m looking forward to playing these songs and hearing a room full of people all sing the word “florid” at the same time. [Laughs.]
