We caught up with Planet Hunter over the lockdown for a chat about their music.
Who are you? Tell us a bit about your music:
We are three Millennial males and one Gen X male living in Wellington with partners or wives and holding various jobs. A couple of us have small humans to look after. We’ve all got different interests, but we share a common love of creating music. Happily for us, our music is increasingly resonating with other people. To be honest, we’re lazy as musicians. We aren’t pushing hard for anything; we get together in Jed’s shed periodically and crank out riffs. The riffs become songs, get recorded, then we tell Facebook about it and get back to the drudgery of the work/life grind. Music for us is a hobby with an element of public interaction. It makes us happy – as hobbies should.
What have you been working on lately? Any new tracks or albums on the way?
We were due to begin recording an LP in March but unfortunately a global pandemic put a stop to that. Maybe May? The album is slightly conceptual; it’s based around the asteroid Apophis which is due to hurtle close to earth in 2029. Lots of heavy riffs and themes of demise. The album will be released as a comic book.
Where is the best place people can follow you & find your music?
Facebook is the most active, but we’ve shoved ourselves everywhere: Instagram, YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud. All these can be accessed from our Website.
What were the 3 most influential albums to you growing up?
Gonna break the question rules here. There are four of us and we have quite different tastes in music, so here are the albums where we first went ‘hot damn’ and got a little bit obsessed:
Cormac: The Beatles – White Album
Dave: The Prodigy – The Fat of the Land
Jed: Rage Against the Machine (self-titled)
Will: Pink Floyd – Live at Pompeii
Which other Wellington musician (s) would you most like to work with?
Hey, Beastwars, do gigs with us.
What’s your favourite Wellington venue to play in?
Change ‘your favourite’ to ‘virtually the only’ and our answer is Valhalla.
In your songwriting or composing (or the band’s songwriting) how do the compositions and songs take shape?
We head to the shed and throw riffs at each other. Will records all our jams on a little field recorder and sticks them in a Dropbox for us to mull over. Riffs that hold up to intense scrutiny get formed into songs. Cormac writes the lyrics and has a big hand in structure, sections, transitions etc. It’s very collaborative. Some songs come together very quickly and naturally. Others take months of agonising and reworking and still end up on the scrap heap.
Where/when is your next gig?
Like so many musicians we lost all our gigs due to the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown. We were due to play CubaDupa and Windburn. Both events have suggested postponement rather than full cancellation. We are very lucky that music isn’t income for us; this is an incredibly difficult time for people who require an audience to get paid.