Permission to occupy space: Newton Faulkner extends his arms with new album

Newton Faulkner is far from his ‘Dream Catch Me’ identity.

A breakout track that is fast approaching its 20 year anniversary, the Surrey songwriter has now shred his dreads and his comfortable skin, stepping out to explore and embrace all parts of his musical arms. Eight to be precise.

The transitional period comes in the form of the eighth studio album for the multi-platinum selling singer songwriter. Titled OCTOPUS, the collection reflects the mollusc, being by far Faulkner’s most ambitious, curious, and intellectually structured work to date.

Over five years in the making, the album’s genesis begins in bed during the height of the pandemic.

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“Part of the way I dealt with [lockdown] was going to bed with manuals, of equipment manuals like ProTools and lying in bed and learning all of the shortcuts,” Faulkner explains.

“I went so deep into it because I knew I wanted to make a record and I knew there were so many points in the past where I wouldn’t be able to do something and I would just get someone over to help me. When that option wasn’t there I was like “Oh shit, I’m going to have to learn how this works”. It’s quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to me as an artist because it gave me so much more freedom with this record, because there was nothing I could think of that I didn’t at least have some idea of how to create, which was so fun.”

Developing his technical skills also resulted in understanding the scope of sounds at his disposal. 

“It’s an endless landscape. Even if you’ve read the manual which is how they intended you to use it, there are still thousands of things that you can do that they didn’t perceive you to do which is amazing. Definitely having a deeper technical understanding did mean that even if I was working in a genre that I had never been in before with tones that I had never used, I understood the scientific principles of applying them and could make it all work,” he explains.

Keeping with the characteristics of the shapeshifting, soft-bodied Celphalopoda, OCTOPUS genre-bends, morphing to adapt to foundations of funk, R and B, soul, and Latin. 

“Stylistically it goes to loads of places I had never been,” explains Faulkner.

“I think the thing that separates this album from anything I had done before is actually kind of an internal question that I had banned from entering my head. At certain points where I would be working on something in the past, it would get to a certain point -it would be leaning to somewhere a bit off path to somewhere I had never gone – and a bit of my brain would be like “ok this is fun, but what would Newton Faulkner do…what would people who like him want this to do next?”. It’s a cage you build for yourself and no one else was doing it to me. It was just this slight questioning of how far I was allowed to go. But with this record, I think partly because I shaved my head and that was shedding of the past feeling to it, and partly age and partly all kinds of things, and feeling comfortable with myself; I felt ready to see what happened if instead of second guessing what people who liked what I’ve done in the past would want this track to do, I was very much like where does this want to go? Where is it going, and I didn’t get in the way or stop anything from going anywhere. So things went so much further than I could have ever imagined them going because no one was pressing the brakes at any point. It was like “okay, we’re going here – lets fucking go!”.”

There’s even a smattering of K-Pop in the mix, completely unexpected and entirely from outside input.

“There were guest people that came in like Los Bitchos coming in and playing guitar was amazing, Lissie doing vocals, Bloom Twins was another really mindblowing meeting of totally different concepts. I had written something that sounded like early punk and it felt so visceral and it did occupy this weird space of quite aggressive happiness which I quite enjoyed but it felt overly manly to me, and then having them come in pulled it back in line for me. They brought this super modern, almost ice cool K-Pop layer to it,” he laughs. 

“Obviously they’re a Ukrainian dance act but it had this flavour to it and it put it in a much more unique space to me. I had no idea what they were going to do and as soon as they started doing it I was like “That is great!”.

 

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With the album set for release on 6 March, Faulkner will also be returning to Australia to celebrate. He tackles Victoria on Friday 17 April, playing Barwon Club, Geelong, followed by Theatre Royal Castlemaine, and Prince Bandroom Melbourne across the weekend of 18 and 19 April, respectively. 

Tickets can be purchased here.