For Hoon frontman Daniel Breda, the do-it-yourself mentality infiltrates every part of his life. He’s speaking to NME from his painting room, where he works on both his own acrylic paintings and designs for the band – the latter of which are then screen-printed at bassist James Andrews’ house. Hell, even his Zoom set-up is DIY: “I’ve got a desktop webcam that I can’t move,” he laughs, glancing up at its odd angle. “It’s gaffer-taped to a 100cm TV!”
A skewered perspective and making things work through unconventional means are nothing new to Hoon. Their eponymous 2017 demo album was recorded at home. Its cassette follow-up, 2019’s ‘Hoon 2.0’, was literally a student project at Sydney’s SAE Institute for a mate that was studying there. For freshly released debut album ‘Australian Dream’, however, Hoon headed into an actual studio for the first time – The Brain in Sydney.
“The Australian dream… it’s not really real, is it? It’s just a cycle of debt”
This improvement from the band’s previous recording environments was the first of several indicators that Hoon were aiming to level up. The next was creating a start-to-finish project with an endgame in mind. “We never really thought much about our process before this,” Breda says. “We’d have an idea, we’d jam, we’d make a song, we’d record. Once we had enough, we’d just throw them together.
“This time around, I think we were a lot more conscious of what we were writing and making. We were critiquing the songs, and changing things about them as we went. It wasn’t just our usual way of, ‘alright, we’ve got these songs, we should record them straight away’. I’d say it’s the most focused we’ve been on something we’ve made.”
That focus also plays into the sound of ‘Australian Dream’ itself. Its snarling bass, churning riffs and belligerent delivery recall noise-rock staples such as The Jesus Lizard and Flipper, while also bearing similarities to more contemporary bands such as Ceremony, Arse and Low Life. Though these are still relatively fringe references, and you’re not likely to hear Hoon on commercial radio anytime soon, it’s still a comparatively streamlined approach from the band’s earlier anarchic approach.
“We used to dive into heaps of different shit,” says Breda. “There’d be songs with doom-metal riffs, others with big shoegaze parts… some were just complete chaos. We didn’t want to lose that chaos entirely, but we definitely wanted to simplify what we were doing and articulate what we were saying. We tried to make it a bit more conventional, while still having unconventional aspects to it.”
“We do things first just for the idea. ‘Is it cool? Yes? We have to try it. It has to be done. How do we make it happen?’ You have to be super tenacious”
Like many albums across the 2020s thus far, ‘Australian Dream’ reckons with the wreckage left behind after what felt like endless lockdowns and subsequent societal turmoil – which still lingers long after things have returned to ‘normal’. Watching it unfold from within the working-class framework of Wollongong – commonly known as the “steel city” on account of its steelworks established circa 1927 – Breda and his bandmates had a first-hand glimpse into some of life’s harsher realities.
“Over the course of the pandemic, I felt like I was witnessing people becoming insular for the first time in their lives,” says Breda. “People got so angry. Remember when tradies weren’t allowed to work, and shit hit the fan? They had idle hands, and started freaking out about their mortgages. As a child, you’re shown all these things that you can aspire to have – but even if you end up getting them, if you can’t pay your debts then they’re stripped away from you. The Australian dream… it’s not really real, is it? It’s just a cycle of debt.”
To Breda, holding up the shards of a broken mirror and using his words as weapons are instrumental to how Hoon currently operates – be that through the unapologetic anti-authoritarianism of ‘ACAB’, the dissection of careerist ladder-climbing on ‘Smashed In The Yard’ or the rallying cries against both corporate and political corruption on single ‘Propane’.
“I’ve come to find it much more interesting – and a lot more powerful – to write about what’s actually happening,” he says. “Even though I’m mostly writing by myself, it feels like a group experience when we’re performing. Not just the four of us, but anywhere between 10 and 400 people in a room watching. You’re all doing it together. It opens up the music in a way I feel we haven’t had before. It’s what’s so powerful about public art – it’s grander than the person that made it.”
As a live band, Hoon’s reputation precedes them. Not only has it lead them to support slots for Dune Rats and Clowns, it’s also given them a platform to create both local initiatives and community around Wollongong’s music scene. They’ve put on a series of all-ages shows at the city’s Youth Centre with exhibition showcases for local visual artists, in addition to creating The Gong Crawl – an all-day, multiple-venue and completely free festival that brought bands like Sydney’s Party Dozen and Adelaide’s Placement to the titular ‘Gong.
Asked what it means for he and Hoon to curate such positive events for the Illawarra area, Breda has a slightly surprising answer. “As nice as it is to do things for the community, that’s honestly not where it starts. We do things first just for the idea. ‘Is it cool? Yes? We have to try it. It has to be done. How do we make it happen?’ You have to be super tenacious, especially if you’re chasing funding for stuff, but if you want it to happen badly enough then you can make it possible one way or another.”
“We didn’t want to lose the chaos entirely, but we definitely wanted to simplify what we were doing and articulate what we were saying”
For a city overlooked on Australian tours for years, it’s remarkable to see what Wollongong has been able to nurture and develop over the last decade. Even as we speak, Hockey Dad are on a headlining tour through Europe – a lofty fantasy for anyone outside of the big smoke now a tangible reality.
“It’s pretty cool, man,” says Breda with a smile. “There’s always new bands coming through – Private Wives have been killing it lately. Even bands not necessarily within our circle, like Pacific Avenue – to see them blowing up is pretty crazy. It all adds up to this notion that you can develop a career here, which is not something that gets said of the smaller cities in Australia very often.”
Forged in steel, built tough and carrying a weightiness that could only be synonymous with the scene’s unofficial slogan of “Gong heavy” – that’s Hoon, and that’s ‘Australian Dream’. It’s a firestarter, a punk-rock riot and a half-hour of power, but it is not, however, a revelation. Not lyrically, at least.
“I don’t think anyone is going to learn anything from this record,” says Breda matter-of-factly. “That might seem like a bad thing to say, but unfortunately topics like cop abuse and racism and mental health are super prevalent and super obvious within our current society. It’s all over the news every single day. If you listen to this record and can’t relate it to the world around you… that’s a bit of a problem, I think.”
Hoon’s ‘Australian Dream’ is out now