The Story Of Aldous Harding's 'Party,' Track By Track
If folk conjures an image in your head, Aldous Harding's Party is that image sieved, sifted and twisted, upended like a rock to show the fat, interesting bugs squiggling beneath it. A dark document of ambition and growth and heartbreak, it's a piece of work that, by design, demands patience.
Like her record, Harding speaks slowly, in deeply considered sentences. In the background as we spoke, birds sang and rain plip-plipped, her chin perched on books as she smoked a cigarette.
Harding's roots are in New Zealand's almost bizarrely fertile folk scene — a former roommate, Nadia Reid, has also drawn international eyes — but some time early in the creation of the songs for something shifted, she says. Going over the record song-by-song, Harding says that the turning point arrived while she was writing"When I heard the chorus [of 'Party'] in my head I kind of went, 'I don't know if I'm allowed to do that,'" she says. "I've done something different, and it feels much better. Fits better. And I... went for it, by the sounds of it," she laughs. "I just got stuck in it, now didn't I?"
