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Endurance, perseverance, high tolerances, survivor traits, it’s not easy to say why a band, or bands culls down to a duo. Yet evidenced by some of the greatest groups in rock 'n' roll history, the duo that coexists as songwriters is one that balances traits, strengths, and delivers sonic harmony from the oppositional energy. A duo like HighSchool unleashes years of life experiences on their self-titled debut, and the results are enthusiastically loud. This is a debut that we’ve already singled out for album of the year candidacy, and is a must listen. Wanting to know more, we roused the boys up early once morning to dive into high school popularity, life tips & more:

OnesToWatch: Why are you artists / a band? 

Rory: The reason I like making art is because it's a platform where I can express certain feelings and ideas that I find it hard to articulate through words. Music's an outlet that allows me to express these more sort of nuanced feelings in a way that other mediums wouldn't let me

Scotty: Yes, where language fails, that's when art picks it up and I feel like if I could say it more rationally in language or something else, I probably would. But when you feel that there's something more to say that goes beyond regular communication, art is the best format that we have. 

Rory: And also, it's fun. 

Scotty: It beats doing other shit. 

Rory: It’s an excuse to do a Peter Pan type thing. Don’t have to grow up. You unlock different parts of your brain when you're generating ideas as a musician, but first and foremost, it's just a fun thing to do with a mate. 

I did want to get to the mate part. So many artists these days are solo artists, and I think there’s lots of larger narratives about society and why we are more individualistic and why it's easier to create on our own and all this kind of stuff. But I do think there's a small resurgence of bands, or at least I’m interviewing more and more of them. What brought you together? What made you decide this musical project is best as a collaborative effort to find those feelings and those words through art?

Rory: We met a long time ago, working in hospitality at a pub in the city. I think within a week of meeting, I was living at a shared house, we had a free room, and Scotty was looking for a room. The timing was very fortuitous. Pretty quickly I found out that Scotty played bass and everything just sort of fell into place. We were in a four piece initially, and then that dissolved after a year or so. We were the only two that really kept a strong creative relationship after that. But, yeah, it's important to find someone that you can collaborate with and spend a lot of time with and share ideas with. It's really hard to come by. So when you do – like we have – it's super important to hold onto it, because it's really rare to find someone that's on the same page as you. 

Scotty: Yeah, finding collaborators is difficult, but when you find it, you really have to hold on to it because I think two is such a good number of people to collaborate with. With three, you start to get clunky. It’s not as agile. And working by yourself, you can't bounce any ideas off anyone. Too lonely. Two is perfect. 

Rory: It's like going to the gym by yourself versus with a spotter, you know what I'm saying? You need someone to push you a bit. 

Scotty: I'm sure there's plenty of people that really love the solitude of writing music by themselves, but for me, I find it a lot easier with one other. We've been lucky enough to meet and be able to create music together for almost 10 years now, between a few different bands. So I couldn't do it without him, honestly. 

There we go. What is your writing process like? Do you have roles? Do you mix it up? Do you guys bring ideas separately and then hash them out? How does a song come together for you? 

Scotty: There's no one way to skin a cat. I couldn't say that there's one process or formula that we always operate by. We bring different things and we bounce ideas off each other, and there's not really a way we do it, is there? 

Rory: No, it's changed over the years a bit, but the instruments have always been interchangeable, so we both play everything and anything. Often I might come to the table with one thing and that'll be the groundwork, or Scotty will come with a bassline, for instance, and we'll piece everything around that. A lot of the instrumental intention is to create the most catchy, rich harmonies that we can. So if we have a bassline, then we'll work a guitar line against that until it perfectly sits next to it and is really catchy. But if that line doesn’t work as a guitar, it might become a vocal hook. 

But in terms of influence, initially we were very inspired by bands that already sounded like us. Which is great, but you end up sort of making things that feel like they've already existed. Whereas now, we're drawing inspiration from genres that people maybe wouldn't expect, like SoundCloud rap or Midwestern emo. Then we funnel it into the HighSchool sound and it creates something that’s a bit more different. 


Well it’s working. I would not have expected SoundCloud rap to be an influence, but I can hear it now that you say it. 

Scotty: A lot of that stuff gets written off as not using as much effort, but I think the vocals on trap or modern hip hop are super amazing and melodically rich. It's a good influence for us. 

Rory: Yeah, the vocal melodies in particular of Cloud rap are insanely interesting and insanely good. And as time goes on, there is crossover between rappers and guitar music. I think it's important to not be inspired by just one type of music and listen to all sorts of stuff and see how you bounce ideas from that. 

So I got to ask, will you guys have an Aerosmith x Run DMC moment? Do you have a SoundCloud rapper you're gonna invite onto a record feature? 

Rory: That would be great. They all blow up too quick, though. We’re still emerging, and they’re all in the stratosphere of fame. 

Maybe one day. Let's get into the upcoming record. You’ve chosen to make it self-titled, so what does HighSchool mean in the context of this release? 

Rory: We never took the name literally for the first couple of EPs and aesthetically, we never tapped into anything that was actually relative to high school. But I think our music has always been surrounded in nostalgia and the attempt to evoke a melancholic feeling that's reminiscent. So we went a little bit more literally on the album because I do think that thinking back to high school does evoke a lot of these feelings. So we wanted each song to evoke a different feeling from youth. A lot of the songs came out of trying to bring back up these feelings, whether they're negative or positive. It's interesting how people have already responded to it. We'd always shied away from taking our name literally, but it's been an interesting process to think back to school.
In a lot of ways, we were thinking about how easy things were and how we resented so much at the time, but as you move into adulthood, it’s easier to see just how singular it is to have everything lined up for you as a kid. You don’t have to think too far ahead. 

Scotty: High school is a period of time that most people get to experience, and it’s usually very formative. So I think people can look back and reflect on what a strange, interesting time it is. Also, I think the myth of high school is continually propagated through its depiction in media and film. I like the myth and then the myth starts getting integrated back into your experience of high school, and this album is us contributing to that feedback of what it is to be in high school, what it is to grow up, what it is to come of age. 

Wow, very meta. Does this release work in tandem with any future releases? Does it set something else up, or is this more of its own moment in time and you’ll let it breathe then move on to the next thing? 

Scotty: It was quite a long process, this record. We were living in the UK for about three years and we wrote it sporadically across that time between touring and dropping smaller releases. But it definitely feels like quite an eclectic record. There’s a HighSchool sound throughout the theme, but it’s definitely charting quite a wide expanse in terms of genre. So maybe on a second record, we could hone in really specifically to one sound and sort of push that. I'd love to operate in a different way in terms of the timeline. I'd love to just write intensively for a month and then record pretty soon after and just see what comes out, because I do think that spontaneity is really important as a musician. We maybe lacked that a little bit on this record. We were dealing with the life of touring, where it's hard to work quickly. So I'd be pretty keen to keep the ball rolling and smash out another one, to be honest, and see what happens. 

Rory: Yeah. It feels like a period of time for me, and that we captured that. The next thing will be about the next period of time. We're just starting to write some new stuff which we’re excited about. We're going to record a couple tracks when we go back to the UK in about a month for a run of record store shows. I feel like in this day and age, audiences are pretty quick to move on from things. You've got to just keep throwing stuff at them. 

You've got to be a SoundCloud rapper. That's their secret. 

Rory: They're dropping tracks and their whole PR plan is just like no build-up. It's just “new track dropping today,” bang. I kind of like that as well. 


Do you have any ambitions for this record? 


Rory: In a quality over quantity sense, the feedback that we get and when people tell us that the music that we're making resonates with them in a really specific way, that's kind of my main takeaway. That's the main thing that I want. Obviously, everyone wants their music to be heard on the widest scale possible, you want to impact people as much as you can, and as many people. We’ve got a few goals, like our first proper headline US tour. But ultimately, we want to just continue to build on what we’ve already done and we love to see those messages from fans. That’s what we do it for. 

Scotty: Of course we have ambitions, but mostly I’m grateful for how far we've come and I just appreciate everybody who appreciates music and the fact that we can do this, I’m super stoked on it. 

Love it. Gonna pivot to some more, hopefully fun questions. Who has the best ideas in the studio? 

Scotty: I’d say probably Rory, I don’t throw out the good ideas left and right. Mine are few and far between… 

Rory: I think it’s just different styles of ideas. I’m like 90% not on, and then when I’m on it’s good. But Scotty’s just consistent. He comes in every day with a new bassline. It sets the whole track up. I’m sort of hit and miss. Different approaches. 

I can already feel the collaboration. Rory, you maybe have low floor, high ceiling ideas, and Scotty just brings it every day. Steady. 


Rory: Yeah, that's it. It’s funny because when we met 10 years ago, we were vastly different and we've slowly turned into one being over time... I've chilled out over the last 10 years, and I feel like Scotty's gone crazy. Now we've met in the middle. 

Scotty: Sometimes I’m saying shit and I'm like, this is exactly how Rory says this. You influence the way I speak and shit. 

Rory: We've turned into one being, which is essentially the band. 

Deciding what tracks make the record or what ideas get added, what's the veto process like? Do you guys have arm wrestles or flip a coin? 

Rory: We’re normally pretty agreeable, and I think as an artist, it's important to know when to just call it and be like, this is what it is, the song is done. We often continue to push things. Like the last single we just put out, that was done and dusted and then we were like, “Fuck, this song's great, but it'd be great to just give her that extra 10%.” And then we pretty much completely reworked it, put a new bridge in, a new chorus, and turned it into – I think we could both agree – a much better song. So we're continuing to try new things and no idea is a bad idea to at least to try. But if it ever does come down to a bit of an arm wrestle, it’s more of a “trust me” thing. But we're normally pretty agreeable, to be honest. 

Scotty: But I do feel like, in probably all art, what you have to do is you have to write a lot of things and then cull. You have to have a good selection to start. And it's that simple, really. As long as you make a lot of work, you're able to just cull and then you leave the good stuff. We do that a lot. We write many, many tracks for one album and the best 12 are kept. Starting songs is always the fun, easy part. The initial idea is always super exciting. And then it's actually transforming into a finished, digestible, reasonably short track is what's hard. I think finishing stuff for us is what's always been the hardest and I think is for most artists. 


Question about the art direction for the album. Who decides, who's making out with the girl and who's standing lonely by the lockers? How did that come together? 

Rory: Well, that's my girlfriend. 


Oh, so it's sort of self selected? 

Rory: Well, Hannah, my partner, has always been very involved in the visual aspects of the band and has helped in the past with videos and photos. For the cover, we wanted to evoke what Scotty was talking about before with these high school tropes. It's a bit tongue in cheek, but we wanted to promote this continuing story of what high school is, but also, make people reflect on it in a way. There's a lot of humor to it. 

Scotty: It’s also likely fair to say that this is what we were like in high school. I was a bit more of a loner and you were getting the babes. You don’t reckon? 

Rory: Well, it's definitely some sort of projection, but what's interesting is you look so cool in that picture. 

Scotty: Yeah, well, that's the thing. Everyone will interpret it differently. To one person, I’m a loser by himself, but to someone else, I’m cool listening to music and you’re the annoying jock. It’s up for interpretation, you know. 

Rory: I feel like all the coolest people now were the nerds in school. 

Scotty: All the jocks now are kind of washed up. But, the art direction is massive for us. Also in terms of videos. We’ve both worked in film in our day jobs, so that's always been an equally important aspect and I feel like we have a film following the same way we have a music following, and our videos seem to be resonating with people in a way outside of music, which is great. We care equally about that sort of stuff. 

Awesome. I'm gonna end with a couple of recommendations. First, I’d like one that’s non-musical, so it can be a place to visit, activity, something to eat, whatever you want. And then I'd love a music recommendation to sign off on. 


Rory: I mean, this one might sound silly because you live in L.A. We were in L.A., and we went to a place called
Avenue 26. These are probably everywhere and we'll sound stupid to the LA community. But when we were touring and we played in LA, we went to this place in Skid Row called Avenue 26 and it was not only the best Mexican I've ever had in my life, but it was also the best food period I've ever had in my life. And the eating experience, it was just a taqueria where you drive, lean against your car, drink a little horchata or a cold Modelo and eat a couple little tacos laying against your car. It was just like the most amazing experience. We don't have that in Melbourne. There's no good Mexican food here. So that whole experience, it was so good. Went there twice, it was so spicy. 
Do you know this place? 


I do know this place. I'm very familiar with where it is…


Rory: To you, is this a good taco place? 

I will say this, every local neighborhood has a version of that. And if you're local to it, you swear by it.

Rory: It's sort of like banh mi here. There’s a massive Vietnamese community in Melbourne and there's a plethora of amazing banh mi shops. So everyone's got their own favorite and it's pretty divisive but yeah, that was probably my favorite part of the whole US. 

Scotty: For our music rec, if we’re keeping it in the Soundcloud rapper realm, let’s go City of Crows by Sickboyrari, one of my favorite records of all time. Sickboy has been a really good influence for us, someone that I feel has been doing something pretty different for quite a while now. Just such a good artist. And is also aesthetically really interesting and uses irony and stuff in a really interesting kind of way.

Well, gents, that was amazing. 

HighSchool: We’ll have to link when we’re in LA, go to some different tacos stands. 

Thanks guys, continued success.