Mansionair unpack every song from Shadowboxer

Since their formation in 2014, Sydney’s indie-electronic prodigies Mansionair have received universal acclaim.

In 2017, their collaborative track with Odesza, ‘Line Of Duty’, earned them a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Record. Now the band have finally unleashed their career-defining debut record, Shadowboxer, and it is as every bit stunning as you’d hope.

To celebrate the release of Shadowboxer, we asked Jack, Alex and Lachlan from Mansionair to unpack each of the songs track-by-track. Read what they had to say.

Watch: Mansionair – We Could Leave

Est

We were staying on a couch in London with our friend Dot who plays in London Grammar for 2 weeks before a tour started and he had a ton of synths in his living room. We’d wake up surrounded by all of this synths and would just record ourselves with these long synth jam. It sounded manic, sounded like my brain sometimes when things start falling apart. Feel like a good place to start an album

Alibi

Jack: The track was one of the last songs we wrote for the album. Spending years mulling over the ideas of the record we wanted to open with something confident, maybe even a little brash. I was watching and reading a lot of crime fiction at the time and grew obsessed with the idea of being abandoned by your alibi, and how it feels to be left out to dry by someone you love. For me the ‘you’ in this song is myself and learning to back the decisions you make and trust yourself.

Alex: This song is us pushing ourselves to the edge of aggression. It’s somewhat uncharted territory for us but I really felt like every band should know what their limits are.

Easier

Jack: Sometimes the struggles in our life can be boiled down to a moment in time. For me, it was endless nights staring at the ceiling wondering what I was going to do next. It was inspired by a scene from lost in translation which has this exact moment in it. Too often we tire ourselves overthink things we can’t solve or understand. Easier is that feeling and a longing for answers. I think I’ve learnt that perhaps it doesn’t get easier you just learn to see your struggles differently, more as a lesson or practice.

Alex: This song was one of the first songs that proved to me that I should follow my gut. Not sure if you guys remember but the song originally had a UK drum and bass groove to it. As much as I had those voices in the back of my head saying “don’t slow it down, it won’t get on the radio” I felt I had to push forward with the messy half time groove because that was me being me.

This was also the first time I realised that the actual recording quality doesn’t have to be perfect. A lot of the drums are recorded from my iPhone in my garage. Allowing your circumstances to dictate how a song should sound has really been a big personal mantra.

Watch: Mansionair – Technicolour

Technicolour

Jack: This track is about a relationship falling apart because not enough emphasis was put into being a lover. So many times we forget the little ways to love someone, the ones that all add up to a good relationship. It’s about realising you’ve lost someone and it’s way too late to try and piece it back together.

Lachlan: This song has gone through so many different versions, it’s shifted stylistically over the years as we did.

Alex: This song was the first big boost of confidence I got in our ability to finish songs and also in my own production style. Being able to re-arrange a song that everyone reacted to seemed to open up the door for our entire catalogue and mark the beginning of us starting the album (for me)

Heartbeat

Jack: The idea of a beating heart just baffles me, how it just beats again and again until one day it stops. Listening to a heartbeat focuses you to the moment, to the amazement of being alive, or even in love.

Lachlan: We wanted this song to feel like a world that you are getting sucked in and out. Ultimately it’s a song about the closest of intimacy and we loved the idea that this would sit just before Astronaut, which is a song about loneliness.

Alex: This song was a real moment in experimenting with restraint and allowing the complexity & uniqueness of the song come from the structure. The juxtaposition of the intimacy of the vocals and the expansiveness of the music is really what makes this song special.

Watch: Mansionair – Astronaut

Astronaut

Jack: This track feels like the second part to heartbeat. That the idea of love is it can last even with distance, as though there’s something tied between two lovers always. Distance is hard, but it can also teach you the strength and endurance of your love for someone.

Lachlan: This song starts with this augmented piano recording we made, it’s the sound you hear right at the start, it almost sounds like what I imagine an astronaut would hear looking back at the world in orbit. Sometimes that’s what being a musician feels like, so far away from everyone on tour.

Alex: This song explores the parallels of being a touring a musician and being an astronaut. Both professions from the outside seem to be glamorous in our society but in truth they can be very lonely at times. The saving grace is that while you may be far away you can still feel that sense of love coming from home.

Violet City

Jack: Trying to find control in a place you don’t belong can be incredibly difficult. I love to control things, and when arriving in LA for a month of songwriting. I felt lost, a little everywhere, as though I had so much to prove, I stopped being myself and it made matters worse. This song is about learning to let all that social anxiety go, lose a little bit of care, maybe you’ll find things about yourself you didn’t know existed.

Alex: When you let things be as they are and don’t try to control them, the more ease you will have and ultimately the more control you will have. Violet city is about that paradox. The irony is that we had very little control over the making and life of this song. If we had listened to ourselves a bit more maybe the process wouldn’t have been so painful. I’ve eventually learned to enjoy this song for the learning curve that it is. We wouldn’t be where we are today without it.

We Could Leave

Jack: This track follows the internal dialogue of being shy in a crowded room whilst also admiring someone that’s caught your eye. It’s about all those insecurities, trying to stay cool, yet confident, and going over all the things that could go wrong, telling yourself it doesn’t have to amount to anything more than a conversation. It’s probably the most light-hearted track on the album and one that was really fun to write

Alex: I love the use of one single idea to create a whole song. The motif itself isn’t what makes the song great it’s all the pieces coming together in synergy. I’m very glad this song is on the record because it shows another side of us.

Shadows

Jack: One of the first songs we wrote for Shadowboxer, this song came to set up the crux of the record. For years we faced our shadows and focussed on the things we shouldn’t have. This song is about turning around from that and looking the other way. By letting the shadow fall behind you it no longer holds so much power, it’s just there, it will always be there, it’s just up to you how big you let it become.

Alex: If you’d asked me 2 years ago if this song would make the album I probably would have said no, but I think it’s a really important part of the puzzle. Finishing this song broke the myth that “if a song is written as a piano ballad, it will always be a piano ballad”.

Waiting Room

Jack: Most of you reading this will have been or known someone who’s sat in a waiting room anticipating bad news or having just received bad news. It’s among the most hopeless feelings in the world, a reminder that there are many things we cannot control or stop from happening. It’s about the fragility of life, a reminder to hold on to one another and make the good things last. This is the rawest track on the record and one that I hold incredibly dear to me.

Alex: This one for me taught me not to overthink song. The song is simple at its core and not mind blowingly exciting but it holds a certain emotion and message in it that really connects. Sometimes it’s better not to mess with that.

Falling

Jack: I wrote the first line of this song on a night out trying to drown some feelings in the wrong thing. I woke up the next day with a terrible hangover and still had the same problems, dare i say even more. This track is a song of admitting faults and being too scared to try and pick yourself up again. There’s not actually a big issue with falling or failing, just as long as you’re reaching for the right things and your landing next to the ones that can help pull you back up again.

Sierra

Lachlan: We wrote this when we went away to a cabin in the middle of the mountains in California to finish the record. I was missing home a lot and also missing my 1 year old niece. I wanted to write her a lullaby that my family could play to her while I was gone so that I could still feel connected to her despite being so far away. All the sounds in the background are sounds from the cabin.

Alex: This song just reminds me of the cabin and love how I’m instantly transported to that time in my life just from the sound of birds and a piano.

Harlem

Jack: The feeling of the song to me is more vivid than the words I could say. It’s about being in the backseat of a taxi driving home with a lover or your friends. To me this song feels like all those careless, even reckless moments, staying out late and falling in love.

Lachlan: There’s an American composer called Steve Reich who has been a huge influence on me. This song is a bit of a tribute to him. He talks about Music as a Gradual Process, both in that how the music is made and also that sometimes the process of making the music is the music. Somewhat ambiguous and confusing but Harlem is a song where I tried to explore the idea of everything working together, but things are just moving in and out slightly. You could play every part of the track on top of each other at the same time and it would all still work together. This song taught me to relax about the process of making music.

Alex: This song is a great example of the cinematic quality of Mansionair. I love how our music goes so perfectly with visuals and this song is the epitome of that for me.

Best Behaviour

Jack: There’s a lot on this record about social anxiety. This track in particular really sums up that emotion i grappled with. It’s a reminder to not try and fit in all the time, to stop acting like everybody else. When we do that we all get so bloody boring. It’s a song about being yourself, admitting your awkwardness and allowing yourself to be different.

Alex: This song is about trying to fit in. The end section represents the release of all that frustration of trying to conform to what other people want us to be or how they think we should act.

I Won’t Take No For An Answer

Jack: In many ways these words some up what this album is to me. The idea of not allowing defeat. So much of our lives feel like uphill battles, like we’ll never catch a break. I’ve learnt that with the right amount of tenacity we can find ourselves achieving the things we set out for ourselves. We got to take our chances, bet on ourselves, let a little light in and keep going

Lachlan: For me, this song is almost a response to Easier. It’s switch from pleading if things will get better to taking matters into your own hands.

Alex: This song is very poignant in terms of how many times we could have thrown in the towel with this record. I’m very grateful that I’m in a band where I’m allowed to make music like this song. The style of drumming is super off kilter but it represents a huge part of who I am. Pushing through with who you really are is probably the most important thing we can do.

Heirloom

Jack: Inspired by the death of Dennis Wilson, Heirloom explores the idea of attempting to breathe underwater in order to reach for lost treasure. To me it really became an exploration in the lengths we go to to prove our love. That even the idea of death isn’t a scary thought when you love someone. I had so many crazy dreams about this idea and this song is an attempt at me trying to make sense of it.

Lachlan: There are two scenes in this song for me, scene 1 is when the arpeggiated synths are all playing. They never seem to resolve properly, falling over themselves constantly with uneven phrase numbers and suspended chords. To me it’s the feeling of anxiety, of repetitive thinking and never feeling at peace. Scene two is the chorus, when everything feels like it goes underwater, and there’s this weird sense of calm only to come back out into a more intense sense of anxiety.

Alex: This song really explores the feeling of lucid dreaming, the fluidity of searching for what we want and the inevitable push towards death. I personally struggled with the notion of how dark the subject matter is but I persevered through because I knew it was only temporary and I knew that this song would one day mean so much to all of us.

Listen to Shadowboxer below.

Mansionair will be touring Australia in May, tour dates and ticket information below.

SHADOWBOXER AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES
with support from Exhibitionist
Tickets available here

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