Shortstraw never intentionally took a hiatus. Instead, the hiatus sort of took them. “It’s one of those weird things, like the older you get, the faster time goes,” the band’s vocalist and songwriter Alastair Thomas tells me. “It’s been five years since our last release, but it hasn’t actually felt like that long to us because life has just kept coming at us.” Five years isn’t an unreasonable amount of time in the grander scheme of things.
As Alastair points out, some artists take nearly a decade between albums. But that’s not what people expected Shortstraw to do. In fact, it’s those expectations that have proved to be a more complex balancing act. A generation of South Africans will remember Shortstraw as the indie pop-rock breakout success of 2013, a crew of sun-kissed happy-go-lucky dudes with an equally as sun-kissed catalog of happy-go-lucky, poptimistic radio hits. Or, “those guys who sing Bikini Weather,” Alastair chuckles. “But I mean, that was 13 years ago now. So we’re constantly trying to shake that.”
Their unintentional hiatus is possibly exactly what the band needed to refine who and what Shortstraw is – enough time to let life give them new experiences and thus, new songs to reintroduce themselves with a fresh perspective. “Our guitarist, Tom, has moved overseas. So he’s kind of not in the band anymore, but he still is in the band. He just doesn’t play shows with us anymore,” Alastair explains. “And our families have been growing. So Tom had a kid. Russ, our bassist, just had a kid in January. My first is due in November.”
It’s a lot of change for a band who once navigated the experience of growth with a simple “cheer up!,” and this period of change is ultimately what informs the direction of their current project (or projects, depending how you see it) — a trilogy of EPs titled Life, Death, and Everything In Between. “Well, it’s actually an album,” says Alastair. “The idea is that the album is made up of three EPs that we’re going to release over the next year and a half. The life that’s happened in the last five years has absolutely influenced this. We thought that realistically, based on how life was going, that this would be an attainable goal.”
What started as a practical solution to navigate the bands’ shifting obligations became the thesis of the project itself, with each collection of songs being informed by one of the formative experiences that the band have gone through. “Life is fairly self explanatory. We’ve all kind of experienced new life for the first time over the last few years. Death is also self explanatory. Friends of ours died, dogs died, you know, like death is always around us.”
But in classic Shortstraw fashion, things are a bit deurmekaar – don’t expect the three EPs to be released in what most would consider the logical order. “Rubber Arm”, the band’s new single, actually comes from Everything In Between, the first release of the trilogy. “We started with Everything In Between because, you know, that’s the stuff that’s kind of been most appropriate for us timing wise,” says Alastair. “So that’s why we thought ‘Rubber Arm’ would be a good first single to put out, to kind of introduce the concept of not just the EP, but like the album as a whole.”
“Rubber Arm” traces the unraveling of a relationship, a very “everything in between” experience, but also sort of one about death. The single is both familiar territory for Shortstraw, with an ample dose of their signature wit and cardigan-wearing charm, and totally fresh – there’s a weight to the track that distinguishes it from the carefree breeze of “Bikini Weather” and “Couch Potato”, a weight that Alastair says has always been there. “I personally feel like we’ve written some far superior songs, especially lyrically,” Alastair tells me. “So I think I’m constantly trying to, we’re trying to uphold the vibe, but show that there is a little depth behind that.” On the surface, “Rubber Arm” is about watching something begin to slip away, but in the context of the trilogy, it becomes broader — an introduction to a project that understands life doesn’t unfold in neat chapters. More often, they’re happening all at once.
That’s been Shortstraw’s experience over the past decade, and it’s a testament to their self-awareness that the band’s trademark humour has survived the heavier subject matter. Rather than writing darker songs, Shortstraw have just become better at holding opposing emotions together. As Alastair puts it, “A friend of mine once said I’ve got a way of making really sad songs sound really happy. My father died in 2021, and that kind of sparked a lot of reflection and a lot of mourning,” he continues, speaking about the process behind arriving at Death. “I wrote a lot of songs around that over the past four years, but none of them were really ready. Then with Life, as people started having kids, that resulted in some songs kind of popping up about that. Though we haven’t written all the songs for that EP yet.”
Listening to him speak, it’s clear that even he is still discovering what this project is really about, finding it in archives of voice notes, or bits of half-finished ideas. I find the strategy fascinating, and quite punk rock. Shortstraw are breaking all the rules of traditional music releases by creating the project in real-time. It’s more sophisticated than they give themselves credit for. “It’s like a song could be finished, but I wouldn’t have lyrics for it until we actually record it.
At one point, after I’d suggested that Everything In Between felt like an appropriate title not only for the songs but for the way they’re being written, Alastair pauses. “I don’t even think we necessarily realised that,” he laughs. “You have to talk things out to figure them out.”
Perhaps that’s what makes this comeback feel different. Shortstraw aren’t returning with something to prove so much as they are with something to say. The poptimism is still there, but it’s no longer that of twenty-somethings writing songs about sunny afternoons or watching life through the TV. It’s the optimism that comes from having lived through enough of life’s messier moments to know that joy and grief are rarely opposites.
“There were definitely moments where I thought maybe our ship had sailed,” Alastair confesses. “But then you get into a room with your friends and make a noise together, and you remember why you started doing this in the first place. One day we realised it had been almost five years since we’d released anything, and thought we’d better do something about it before we woke up wondering where the time had gone.” Maybe that’s why Everything In Between feels like a more apt place to begin than Life or Death — there’s no time like the present.
Everything In Between is out next month. Shortstraw will be going on tour to support the EP, starting September 04 in Johannesburg. Tickets drop soon on their website.
