Rebuild Repeat

For their fourth studio album, Hockey Dad reinvented the way they write music. “We had to just let our guard down and go, ‘OK, let’s peel back a few layers and actually understand what we’re doing here and what songs we want to write,’” drummer Billy Fleming tells Apple Music. “Let the songs write themselves, in a weird way. If it’s a delicate song, let it be delicate.” Restraint isn’t a characteristic fans would have previously associated with the Windang duo, but it’s well and truly on display in piano closer “Dancing on the Other Hand”, the lounge-esque “Burning Sand” and the power-pop-flavoured “That’s on You”. The desire to explore new sounds was borne out of a simple resolve not to replicate the thrashy rock of their first three albums—although they did try, recording an entire LP’s worth of material before scrapping it. “We just started doing what we had always been doing,” explains Fleming. “We weren’t quite feeling it.” Salvation came in the shape of producer and former Sparkadia vocalist/guitarist Alex Burnett. “He flipped our whole songwriting process,” says Fleming. “[Previously] we would do the music first and lyrics were an afterthought. But he was like, ‘Sit here with an acoustic and actually focus on the lyrics first.’ Some of the best songs on the record were because of that.” “It was good for us to get that jolt and push in a different direction,” adds vocalist/guitarist Zach Stephenson, “and rebuild what we were trying to do.” Here, Fleming and Stephenson take Apple Music through Rebuild Repeat, track by track. “Base Camp” Billy Fleming: “That’s just a bit of a bop, like a little friendly introduction to the record. It was just a song title—Alex had written down some titles, and our challenge was to write something straight off the bat. ‘Base Camp’ is about always striving for more and attaining the goals that you really want to.” “Still Have Room” Zach Stephenson: “It’s about no matter how badly you can be treated by a person, you’ve always