News feed
The title track on the album, Girlhood, is a song about the contradictions of modern womanhood; an upbeat and yet vulnerable feminist anthem. The second single though, Yanada, deals with the importance of the preservation of indigenous Australian languages. Inspired by Sydney theatre Company’s stirring adaptation of Kate Grenville’s award-winning novel The Secret River, The Preatures released their most significant track to date.
“GROWING UP, I HAD NO CONCEPT OF WHAT BEING “GIRLY” OR TRIVIAL WAS…I played with toy trains and also Barbies. I loved thoroughbred novellas but also science fiction. In my early teens, I started to absorb this idea that to be girly was to be frivolous or vacuous. And I explore that on Girlhood: What happened to that word? And why do we use it with that connotation now? Why is being ‘girly’ perceived in a negative way?”
“I THINK THERE’S DEFINITELY SEXISM IN THE AUSTRALIAN MUSIC INDUSTRY…The fashion and music industries are built on creativity but there’s an insipid edge to both. Sexism these days is subtler, its more ambiguous, which makes it harder to deal with. Someone might rub me the wrong way and as a woman in a band of all men – with a crew of all men – it’s difficult to actually be able to call things out.”
“THE HUMAN SPIRIT IS FUNDAMENTALLY GENDERLESS… there is universality about music that defies gender but for women, we have a history: we’ve watched our mothers and grandmothers be silenced in public, talked over at the dinner table, women have been systematically oppressed for years. I think the new wave of female expression is almost like a volcano that had to erupt at a certain point and I’m happy to be a part of it.”
“ONE PART OF THE SECRET RIVER REALLY STRUCK ME… one was the relationship between the females of the two families; an aboriginal woman and an English woman. They formed a tight bond through trade, sharing knowledge and helping birth children. Irrespective of race, we are women first.”
The Preatures’s new album Girlhood is out now. The band will be touring nationally this September. Head to thepreatures.com/tour-dates for information.
