The Hard Quartet: 'We bonded a lot over glam rock like Slade and The Sweet'

Now, after dates in Australia and North America, the band are on tour in Europe and the UK – and Kelly, also known for his work with The Cairo Gang, Will Oldham and Ty Segall, tells The Yorkshire Post he is particularly looking forward to their visit to the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, rating it “one of the best clubs ever”.

“We all have personal connections,” says the Californian singer and songwriter, explaining the group’s origins. “Matt had been doing some recording with Steve before the pandemic on (Malkmus’ album) Traditional Techniques; Jim and me play a lot together, we played on the Bill Callahan album Reality – I was the bass player and he was the drummer. I think Matt (thought), ‘we should work with these guys’. I thought it was going to be me and Jim would be the bass and drums but it ended up being more like an open-ended idea to bring some songs to the table and see what’s up.”

Things clicked when the four got together at a studio in New York. “The studio was going to be shut down so they were able to do a session on the cheap,” Kelly recalls. “The idea was no pressure, let’s get together and jam and see what happens, then if we want to we can press record. After the first day, we realised we had a band going.”

Only White’s role behind the drums is defined; Kelly, Malkmus and Sweeney “switch roles”.

“I hadn’t done any writing for a band in a really long time, so when Matt suggested bringing some songs I didn’t really know what to bring, so I brought really super unfinished things thinking it was going to be a cool opportunity to get into the weeds with people and work on composition,” Kelly says. “Both me and Matt had ideas that were similarly in flux. Steve came with more fleshed-out things. In the end, the way the album played out was determined by what songs we had. We recorded 17 or 18 songs and it was how they could get finished.

“I’m assuming that the (next) album will be approached differently because, for example, I didn’t realise there was an album being made (first time around). It’s been interesting ever since we started working, so let’s work on more stuff.”

Kelly struggles to put his finger on the band’s sound for the unitiated. “When I mention that I have this new band, people would ask ‘what kind of music is it?’ and I’d go, it’s rock ’n’ roll, I guess,” he says. “To be fair, it sounds like the four of us. I think that’s a good thing – it sounds like itself.”

But he does admit they have “hugely shared interests in music – it’s really a vast array of stuff”, adding: “We bonded a lot over glam rock like Slade and The Sweet. Me and Matt have been devouring these records by this guy who has this label called Just Add Water, he puts out this amazing glam stuff, we were listening to that stuff a lot at the time. Similarly all this post-punk dishevelled music from the late ’70s. There’s so many bands you could just go on and on, I mean the full-blown 1978 to 1982 – I work in a record store and that’s my obsession. Then there’s also this free improvisation stuff, and impulsive folk traditional music. We’re all into a lot of stuff, but it’s easy because we have similar tastes and a similar aesthetic.”

Kelly’s main contributions, Six Deaf Rats and Lies (Something You Can Do), reveal his own fondness for the work of cult singer-songwriter Alex Chilton. “I’m a Big Star fan, but I’m not the biggest fan of the first album,” he says. “It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but I think that I really like Alex Chilton, his personality is really cool. (Chris Bell) is cool too but as I get older I’m less and less fooled by or seduced by the dissipated emotional wreck of a songwriter that falls into obscurity. He wrote some great songs but he’s held up as this massive genius who rarely did anything, whereas Alex Chilton had a lot of fun obviously. No shade on (Bell) but I thought that Radio City was like a way more fun album, but the third album that wasn’t fully finished, that is amazing. I’ve listened to that so many times. Like Flies on Sherbert I like as well, but I haven’t gone deep into Alex Chilton’s catalogue.”

Live, Kelly expects The Hard Quartet to play their debut album in full, “but we’re not doing it sound for sound,” he says. “What’s cool about this band is it’s a breathing entity, it morphs, it approaches things situationally.”

The Hard Quartet play at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on June 24. https://thehardquartet.com/