Shock Corridor are on the rise

Their name is also derived from a ’60s psychological thriller, following a journalist hellbent on winning a Pulitzer Prize by intentionally committing himself to a psychiatric hospital to solve a murder. This is all haunting, which is the key takeaway. Shock Corridor extract the harrowing parts from trip-hop, post-punk, and orchestral experimental rock to mix them into cinematic cacophonies equally beautiful and brutal. Typically, they’ll elongate the quiet (“In Your Orbit”), or the unease occurs from the onset (“Mayday!” and “Drag Nets”). Whatever the case, their hair-raising, atmospheric theatricality is remarkable, and an especially novel concoction in their city’s music scene.

This tendency to revel in the darkness may suggest the minds behind Shock Corridor are sullen, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, they’re each lively, warm-hearted young people, but most importantly, incredibly close friends. “Being able to share a stage is such a privilege,” bassist Henry Rawling affirms. “Even if the songs we’re playing aren’t ‘yay, happy time’, I think we still get our closeness across. Whenever I see bands perform and they’re obviously super linked in ways beyond the playing, it’s so much more enjoyable.”

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“It’s been a long time – from being 17 years old to now, we’ve all grown together in the band,” guitarist and vocalist George Miller adds. “Even though there’s six of us, it never feels like there’s six people. It’s never jarring, or there’s never too much going on.” Though he tacks on: “Apart from driving situations… You’re taking two cars. That’s annoying. Double the petrol.” Everyone starts laughing. “I always know I’m in the fun car,” keyboardist and trumpeter Joe Nossal says. “I’m always scared I’m not,” Miller amusingly replies. With camaraderie like that, it speaks volumes about the band’s positive qualities and them as people.

It’s an interplay they’ve continually nurtured in the years since their formation in 2019. The members are scattered across Melbourne’s north, south, and east, but knew each other in high school through their longtime involvement with music. Back then, Rawling attended the same school as Nossal, second guitarist Ari Guthrie, and drummer Paddy Walter, while Miller was elsewhere.

Miller’s band at the time had split, but Rawling came around to rescue Miller’s spirits once he got a bass guitar for his birthday. “It was the best day of my life,” he says of acquiring the instrument. Rawling asked to play with Miller, and they all began aimlessly jamming in Miller’s basement, who recalls “they didn’t have a name or anything, but just messed around making music.” Despite not thinking of the long term, the unit withstood the lengthy Victorian lockdowns and eventually enlisted violist Saskia Permezel, who did projections for their first gig. “Then by the second one, I was in the band,” she says. Miller celebrates her addition: “Sas made us legit; the missing piece.”

As if rising from the ashes, Shock Corridor arrived rejuvenated, no longer an amorphous entity but a confident ensemble ready to go out and perform. Their songwriting process was also refined. Their 12-bar blues rehearsal jams of up to 45 minutes were now a thing of the past. Today, someone will share a piece of music with the group – a beat, chords, and the like – for everyone to play and layer on. “We get straight into the structure as well,” Permezel says. “Which is something we never really thought about.” For instance, the Portishead-indebted, heightening “Abyssal” from their debut 2023 EP, I’m Afraid I’ve Lost My Way, is one of the first songs they wrote with a beat created by Guthrie. “Thank God Joe has taken the initiative to have the brains for the electronic side of things,” he says. “We all go through him as opposed to jamming the same looped beat for an hour straight.”

Sometimes, the difficulty is translating it live: “There are so many elements that we can’t even make happen with six people. It’s kind of ridiculous,” Miller says. It’s clearly no issue, though; a sold-out show at The Night Cat and an intimate gig at the Brunswick Baptist Church through Oddaný Gallery before their debut album are feats not to shrug off. Their musical ambition is undeniable.

In Melbourne, there has been an ongoing trip-hop resurgence. The trio trickpony may steer the genre’s clubbier end, but bands such as Shock Corridor, Dumbhead (who are some of the band’s closest friends), and Plumia carefully sculpt the experimental side. But that’s only been underway post-COVID. Before such a loose scene emerged, the genre had been on all their minds. It’s more so the openness that its figureheads Massive Attack, Björk, and Portishead pioneered that inspired them, as they don’t necessarily view themselves entirely as a trip-hop band.

“We focused on that sound, and from there, everyone brought their own styles of music into that, which made it that really dark thing with all the live percussion, the violin, and the bluesy element,” Miller explains. “I think the foundation was that desire to make something quite open and trip-hoppy, not to have too many limitations of a specific genre.”

The great deal of instruments at their disposal certainly guided their sound. Rawling highlights that Paddy’s jazz drum studies enhance their songs with beats owed to trip-hop. “That’s the beauty of the songs we make, is how that influence is really prevalent.” Yet Melbourne’s diverse, bustling music scene is also a crucial influence. After the throes of COVID, again, everyone was prepared to come out and play. The abolished restrictions coincided with the band turning 18, all old enough to watch live music and partake, leading to a wonderfully “anything goes” mentality in that scene. “We’d be on bills with bands that were doing completely different stuff to us, but it was so much fun,” Rawling recalls. “You draw inspiration from that too. It was an overflowing pot of inspiration and different sounds.” “People work really hard as well, it’s great,” Miller adds. “Everyone’s pushing each other.”

Shock Corridor’s debut album is out on 7 August and is the definitive statement that connects the separate restful and relentless qualities of their dusky music into a single, consistent journey. “That’s why we wanted to self-title it, to have it be a real baseline of what we are like,” Miller says. “Just presenting that this is us. This is how we sound.” As alluded to earlier, previous standalone singles “Mayday!” and “Drag Nets” are urgent, abrasive tracks, but a single isn’t enough time to present a complete journey. Rawling concurs: “A lot of our singles are us figuring out our sound and putting ourselves out there. Now this album is the first chance for people who haven’t been to a show to see the journey and environment we’ve created.”

The peaks and troughs of human experience and universal worry manifest over the runtime. Early anthemic cut “Buster”, named after Miller’s best friend, propulsively moves with an escalating pulse. “Sheet Metal” follows a ritualistic beat doused with dark jazz and stripped-down folk songwriting. “Signs of Stopping” is an eventual respite, offering a hopeful twist on the pertinent gloom with its sparse rhythm evocative of Talk Talk’s spacious post-rock. The record closes with a stormy redux of “Abyssal” that is laboured over even more than its original, Miller’s gravelly voice at the conclusive crescendo echoing Nick Cave. It is all an unravelling, tender catharsis.

Asking whether the lyrics that instil these existential notions are mulled over or spontaneous, Miller admits that they come last. “I’m just trying to place a perspective somewhere. On this record, I tried to home in on the idea of environment, space, place, and connection.” His metaphors may not address anything specific, but that indirectness provides a subjective ambiguity, and therefore their relatability. Permezel, who, in a first for her, shared lead on “Sheet Metal”, agrees: “George wrote the lyrics, but I brought my own meaning to them when I sang my part, even though the words weren’t mine. I could take that song into my own world and have my own perspective on it, which I feel other listeners can do too.”

That readiness to supportively embrace each other encapsulates Shock Corridor. Fundamentally, humans want to be seen, so the ensemble showcase the unexplainable beauty and desperation that constitute this innate psychological drive, drawing upon their own togetherness to unveil the good from melancholia. No matter how engulfed you may be by the darkness, somewhere in there is always a shoulder to lean on, protecting you. Miller’s closing words confirm such: “If it’s a song about isolation, it’s always trying to talk about the hope of connection.”