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Time can get away from you. It’s been more than half a decade since American indie rockers Warpaint put out an album.
“It’s funny that everyone says six years [hiatus], because we never stopped working,” muses their Australian drummer and producer Stella Mozgawa. “We toured our last record for almost four years ... through [to] 2019 when we were in Australia doing Splendour in the Grass.”
Armed with an album: Warpaint.Credit:Mia Kirby
On top of that, Mozgawa co-produced her long-time friend Courtney Barnett’s third studio album, Things Take Time, Take Time, released in November last year.
She is in Melbourne on a muggy March morning when we meet, busy touring with Barnett, to be closely followed by Warpaint’s album release and tour mid-year. It’ll be a while before she’s back in her Joshua Tree home, a 2018 purchase following 14 years of living in Los Angeles.
“I’ve barely spent enough time there to justify calling it my proper home,” she says. “It was somewhere that I wanted to set up a studio and escape when I wanted to do something creative or have friends over.”
That studio helped Warpaint finally come up with a successor to 2016’s well-received Heads Up. They’d been discussing new work without a solid result for years and had plenty going on outside the band. Jenny Lee Lindberg has newly released solo singles, Emily Kokal is mother to a one-year-old and has worked with other musicians, and Theresa Wayman – mother to a teenager – released a solo album in 2018.
“The catalyst was when I had just finished the studio in July 2019 and the girls came and stayed at my place for four or five days,” says Mozgawa. “I remember Theresa bringing in Champion and I think we also played Hips that day, a bunch of stuff that ended up being recorded at my studio. It was the first time we worked creatively outside of touring together for a few years.
“Our ideas were fleshed out in the room between all four of us, which is rare. It got really exciting, it felt like these songs feel different to what we’ve done before, and it feels worthy of the work that’s required to finish an album.”