“We were really looking to fuse rock elements and electronic elements and see if it could work for us,” drummer Toby Dundas tells Apple Music of The Temper Trap’s debut album, Conditions. “We’d always come from a playing-live energy, but just being able to create sounds with drums, bass, a couple of guitars and a voice always felt restrictive to us.” It was for that reason the Melbourne band approached British producer Jim Abbiss, who’d previously worked with DJ Shadow (who guests on Conditions) and on UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction. “That record was a big touchstone for us,” says Dundas. “It fused some amazing rock elements with some really cool hip-hop and electronics.” Armed with vocalist/guitarist Dougy Mandagi’s tender falsetto, a talent for crafting soaring, U2-sized indie-pop anthems (“Fader”, “Sweet Disposition”) and a dedication to exploring the sonic capabilities of drum machines and synths, The Temper Trap recorded Conditions in two stints, the first at Melbourne’s Sing Sing Recording Studio then, a few months later, London’s Assault & Battery. Here, Dundas reflects on The Temper Trap’s landmark debut, track by track. “Love Lost” “‘Love Lost’ encapsulates a lot of the things that The Temper Trap was at the time. The kind of melancholy, hopeful vocals, our funny Casio keyboard sounds that are peppered through the record—that was our one instrument we had outside of guitars. It feels like opening a door and welcoming someone into a space, so that felt like the right song to be the first cab off the rank.” “Rest” “My recollection of the lyrics is that it’s about Dougy’s grandparents. Again, that pulsing bass thing is something we managed to make out of sampling the little Casio keyboard we had. This one was always a live favourite and has one of my favourite Dougy vocal moments, when he hits that big note towards the end. It still sends a shiver down your spine.” “Sweet Disposition” “Lorenzo [Sillitto, former guitarist] had borrowed Dougy’s Boss DD-20 delay pedal, and he was practising scales. He put the delay pedal on and suddenly had this riff which he brought into our rehearsal room. It came together very quickly. We got all the parts, got the beat and Dougy had the melodic ideas really quickly. He literally came back the next day with the lyrics, and that was that.” “Down River” “Jonny [Aherne, bass] wrote the lyrics, and he sings on it too—it’s a nice duet with Dougy. We did a lot of things in the studio searching for little ear candy. A friend of ours came in and played djembe and bongos on it, one of the engineers played flugelhorn. Jonny had been trying to do this part [where he slaps his body] but couldn’t get the sound he wanted, so off comes the shirt, more slapping, then that’s not working, so I think he got down to his undies. In the end we had to edit it out, we decided it was one step too far!” “Soldier On” “Jim’s story about why he wanted to work with us involved this song. I think we’d sent him six songs, and he said this was the song that grabbed his attention. We re-recorded [that demo] as part of the sessions at Sing Sing but, when we listened back, we were like, it doesn’t have the same kind of magic. There’s a fragility that was captured in that [demo] that had something special about it, so in the end we kept it.” “Fader” “We were getting more comfortable experimenting with programmed sounds and synths, and I reckon by the time we’d recorded every part for ‘Fader’ we had about 165 tracks! Maybe more than any other song on that record, people in the band have a different relationship with it. We tried to put it in the cupboard and not play it live, but it’s one the audience connected with and loves seeing in a live setting.” “Fools” “This was written around the same time as ‘Sweet Disposition’. I just had that groove on the drums and we built it around that. We borrowed my mum’s piano to play the jammy bit at the end, which I know would definitely be a Radiohead influence, those rhythmic chords.” “Resurrection” “This was one of the songs that, in the writing process, really fought back at us. From memory it’s two or three songs cribbed together. I think the ending was something Lorenzo and I had been mucking around with, and we’d never managed to get a whole song out of that, nor a whole song from that beginning gentle section. Then we came up with the idea of sandwiching them together and suddenly it all made sense.” “Science of Fear” “I’d been a massive DJ Shadow fan—Endtroducing..... was one of the records that opened my mind to the possibility of production and what can be done in the studio. Jim just really casually went, ‘I’ll reach out and see if he wants to do something.’ And he sent back that really cool, gnarly bass thing that happens, so we brought that in. Getting DJ Shadow to be a part of it was a cherry on top and really exciting for all of us who were big fans of his work.” “Drum Song” “I guess on paper it’s weird for an indie pop band to have an instrumental song on their debut record, but when we wrote it we deliberately didn’t want to have lyrics. In terms of our live show it was, and still is, almost as important as ‘Sweet Disposition’. ‘Drum Song’ just felt like a bit of an exclamation mark at the end of the record.”