This morning, Australian indie rockers Spacey Jane has shared “How to Kill Houseplants,” the second single off their forthcoming album If That Makes Sense. The record is slated to arrive May 9 but, in the meantime, “How to Kill Houseplants” adds a drop of sorrow to the band’s customarily bold, pop-rock cocktail.
“How to Kill Houseplants” became the unintended bookends of the If That Makes Sense recording sessions, with the band tracking its initial instrumental before anything else, but they continually reshaped it throughout the album process until it became the last song completed. Frontman and singer Caleb Harper said of the track, “This song is about love lost and litigating all the things that went wrong and the things you could have done better. It was the first song we recorded for this album but the last song we finished. Once the rest of the record was down, we went back and changed the drum sound, and re-tracked vocals and acoustic guitar. It was cool to see how the rest of the record informed the way this song ended up sounding.
The final product is an introspective and nuanced study of Harper’s lyricism, as well as the band’s innate finesse when it comes to creating grandeur out of just a few timeless musical components. Harper strings up his deep and lonely melancholy within the vocal melody, singing out on the chorus, “Water me darling / love is a garden / It hasn’t rained and it’s starting to show.” His heartbreak lingers between quiet strums of acoustic guitar until the band drops in halfway through the song, firing off like a signal flare in desperate need of help. The drums are explosive, the guitar lines radiant, the harmonies reverberant, and the bass drives it all forward as Spacey Jane presses further and further into the unknown. “How to Kill Houseplants” is a song about how growth comes slow, and those small, sometimes painful moments where change takes root.
Produced by Mike Crossey (The 1975, Arctic Monkeys, Wolf Alice), If That Makes Sense is what every artist’s third album wants to be—a poised and self-reliant reflection of a band that knows their sound, yet not afraid to repaint the box that they’re in. The themes of heartbreak and trauma run concurrent throughout the album, with Harper saying, “If That Makes Sense was written and recorded in LA over a period of 2 years. It took us away from home and out of our comfort zones. It deals with isolation and vulnerability, rehashing the past and looking for identity as deep within yourself as possible.”
Watch the visualizer for “How to Kill Houseplants” below.
