Music That Keeps Us So Alive

The soft swell of a sweet, sweet bass, the building clunk of that sick drop and a mix of emotive lyrics is what many music listeners worldwide absolutely live for. It fuels the cockles, lights the fire and soothes the soul. All you need is that crashing music wave. good music that gives you that thrilling feeling in your gut is oftentimes hard to come by. Sometimes the tunes just need to hit that sweet spot perfectly.

A pair of talented Kiwi musicians that have fast proved that they can hit that spot is multi-talented DUAL. Started all the way back in 2017, they’ve certainly been making tracks to become one of New Zealand’s most hopeful, upcoming music acts that can really get the party started. The brain-child of two friends, Maurice Miller and Jamie Pyne, DUAL offers what few other bands can, that perfect mix of emotive lyrics and jazzy back-beats. Their sound is lush, yet anthem-heavy. Indietronica at its finest.

Maurice and Jamie had met in their early teens at school, vibed over their love for Tame Impala and started up a psyche-rock band called Narwhal. After a couple of years, Miller and Pyne broke away from Narwhal, decided to create DUAL, just those two, and thank God they did.

Their debut self-titled EP came along in 2020 with big dance-floor anthems, appearing on major Spotify and Apple playlists. They’ve played big festivals too, becoming crowd favourites with their excellent live performances. From their first EP to their newly released one, called So Alive (which dropped on the 31st of March) they’ve released handfuls of singles that sizzle and pop with that indie-electro sound.

When we sat down together on the day of So Alive’s release over Zoom, the lads seemed excited, exhausted and (ironically) so, so alive—they’d put a lot into their latest collection. It’s a six-track powerhouse that keeps the listener enthralled until the last beat.

In So Alive DUAL has given us that music we yearn for. The music that gives us life.

Can you tell me the origin story of how DUAL came to be?

Jamie Payne: So Maurice and I met back in high school. We connected over our love for Tame Impala. We formed a band called Narwhal where we were trying to make this psychedelic-rocky sound. That’s where we got our live performing roots. Narwhal sort of fizzled out a little bit when people started going off to university, but me and Maurice just kept writing music with no plan in the early stages. We were just doing it for fun.

We got asked to play a house party—we quickly tried to figure out how we were going to play live. At that party, we got really good feedback, so that gave us a bit of a boost to keep going. We ended up just working out how to write the songs and perform them live as a duo.

Live feedback was the most important thing in the beginning—seeing if songs were or weren’t working, feeding off the energy. And we’ve just been going ever since—writing, recording and performing.

Are there any lessons that you learnt at the very start that you still use now?

Maurice Miller: You’re only as good as your last show. Anything we learn or anything we can improve on or change, as musicians playing live, we’re always manipulating things around. Always tweaking the show, trying to make it the best we can. If some songs or sections don’t work, then we rework or fix them.
Creativity is so tangible. All art can be so easily reformed and replaced to make it into a new thing—a new type of beast. That’s the wonderful thing about being creative.

JP: Yeah man, definitely. We’re not afraid to refine things, to make sounds more honest to ourselves. If things aren’t working, then we just stretch it out and fix it, then move along to the next thing.

What does the DUAL creative process look like?

JP: Creativity for us is just turning up, writing and just being okay with not nailing it the first try. We’ve just got to be there when the creativity is hitting in a big way. We’ve got to be there to get down, and we got to follow that thread while it’s in front of us. We know how to channel it.

Our creative process is quite different for each song. Sometimes we could write the whole song within like an hour—guitar, vocals and the little loop. Or Maurice records vocals over the beat and we come back two weeks later, we write another part, then another two weeks, and another two weeks. So it can be like a refining process, or something that just happens really fast.

Creativity, it’s always being honest with ourselves and following our curiosity. If we’re making something, or hear something cool, we follow that. Or if we just spend an hour working on something and then think, ‘this is the s**t’, we go with it. But the important thing is that we have to turn up and do it to find those little moments when things just happen. We’re always there for it.

MM: We called the latest EP So Alive because every song was written, or created, during a different part of our two lives. They were the moments we turned up.
You can tell from the music and listening to it, there are different moods and different feelings in each little part. You go from a song like Gummy Bear to a song like Lights Out and they’re in completely different worlds.

In creating So Alive, was there a song (or songs) that really stood out as a highlight for you guys?

JP: Probably the chorus of Staring at the Wall. We had gone away for a little ‘writing vacay’ and Maurice was playing all these random little voice memos he made and he had this one song and it was that chorus. It was really slurring and moody. Then we split it up and then put chords behind it. And then it just fit straight away; it had to be a song.

We’re always writing with the melody in mind, the chorus hitting is a big moment. Or it can sometimes start with a beat. We’re always very beat focused with drums, bass and hits. Writing has peaks and troughs, building up to that chorus.

And you’re going to tour the EP?

MM: Yeah, we’re going to plan some Australian shows soon in Sydney and Melbourne. Also, in New Zealand, we want to play Wellington and Christchurch too.

JP: In Auckland, we’ve got our EP release show at Big Fan in Morningside on the 29th of April.

You mentioned being fans of Tame Impala before. What other musicians inspire the DUAL sound?

MM: We listen to so many different types of music. We’re constantly listening to music. We’re inspired by a lot of big bands, like Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, The Doors, The Clash. For me, it’s Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and the rest of their band, and also King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are rad.

I listen to hip hop and jazz too. I think it’s just honestly a big old soup of all that stuff together.

JP: Yeah, there’s not one specific artist that inspires the production or anything, but a lot of sounds. I found this cool guy called Jene Dawson, who’s been inspiring me at the moment. He fuses these different genres together, like alt-rock, hip hop and folk music.

But I guess both of our roots are quite different where we grew up with music. I grew up with more classic rock. The big names, like Led Zeppelin. I got really into grunge and the Smashing Pumpkins, and then Maurice and I both fused our different genre backgrounds together. It’s just like a big sort of melting pot of all sorts of stuff. We can make whatever we want; you’ll never know what the next EP will sound like.

What has been a highlight of your careers?

JP: Just anytime we’ve played live. The first time we saw people singing the lyrics and dancing when we played live was an unreal feeling. As a musician, in this day and age, when you release stuff online, you’re so disconnected from the audience. We release a song, we don’t know who’s listening to it or what kind of effect it’s having on people. But then seeing it when you play live is a pretty rewarding moment.

MM: Yeah, I agree with Jamie. I think playing live is when you get the emotion firsthand. You can see people singing or dancing or you can see the effect in real-time. I think every live show, you get instantaneous feedback straight away from people. ‘What was the third song you played?’ or ‘What was that?’, or I love that. That’s the realest we can get in this digital world we live in.

What has been the best piece of advice you guys have been given?

MM: ‘Do you’. Simple, but it’s true. You are the only you in the world. You’re the only version of yourself. I have a high voice and I can sing falsetto, so over time I was like why don’t I use it to my strength more?

For me, it’s probably just, do you, whatever weird sound that you can make that’s unique to only you, do that.

JP: I can’t remember who said it, but it was about writing music. The advice was, if you can write it and it sounds really good, then that’s all you really need. That’s where you need to start from. That has been really, really helpful for how we create things.

We just get it down on vocals and chords and everything’s working together. The whole song feels really good in that sense. Then you can put whatever you want over the top of it. That was good advice.