The Winner’s Circle: In Conversation with The Hard Quartet’s Matt Sweeney

Talking to Matt Sweeney, and his energy is infectious. The kind where things just, well… happen! Like forming The Hard Quartet. The group Sweeney founded that also features Stephen Malkmus, Emmet Kelly and Jim White.

Supergroups rarely live up to the billing, but that’s simply not the case with The Hard Quarter. Ticking all the boxes, there simply hasn’t been a better one in years.

Earlier this month, Sweeney and I spoke over Zoom about the band’s eponymous debut album, which last Friday was crowned Sun 13’s Album of 2024, joining list-topping alumni such as Luggage, The Lord & Petra Haden, Springtime (also featuring White), and Holy Sons.

The Hard Quartet has it all. Sweeney’s effortless, campfire serenades from Rio’s Song and Killed By Death to the country-inspired majesty of Jacked Existence. Kelly’s beautiful, Big Star echoes on Our Hometown Boy and North of the Border. And Malkmus, who on Heel Highway, Hey, Six Deaf Rats and Gripping the Riptide produces his strongest work in years.

Of course, it’s all glued together by the legendary White. The Australian drummer has had the biggest year out of anybody across the new music landscape, releasing his debut solo album, All Hits: Memories, another LP with experimental guitarist Marisa Anderson (Swallowtail), before the Dirty Three’s celebrated return with Love Changes Everything.

Together, the four-piece deliver something special with The Hard Quartet, a vital through line for all concerned.

Album review: The Hard Quartet: The Hard Quartet

Sweeney, who started out in the late ’80s with his first band, Skunk, before rising to prominence with post-hardcore heavyweights Chavez, has been untied to any style or scene. Having worked with the likes of Will Oldham and the Dixie Chicks to Iggy Pop and Josh Homme with many others in between, it’s no surprise that his boundless reach led him to form a band like The Hard Quartet.

It’s one of those ‘many others’, Endless Boogie, that sparks conversation, as Sweeney recounts a story of their Australian tour – the same destination of The Hard Quartet’s first tour, which begins next month.

“We had some time in the morning and wanted to find the (I’m) Stranded house,” he says, recalling The Saints and the iconic cover of their 1977 debut LP. “We got to the area and started asking around at the shops. Everybody was like, ‘Who are the The Saints?’ No one could help us. We were hungover and spent an-hour-and-a-half bumbling around,” he laughs.

The talk turns to the home of the original Fab Four, Liverpool. “I spent a couple of days there and was struck by how unlike any other city it is,” he says. “I just loved all these things about it… I’d fucking love to have an excuse to go there for a spell.”

Then there’s Merseyside’s lost soul, Jimmy Campbell. Or an unknown one to many, including myself, as Sweeney gives me a background on the songwriter. “20 years ago, we were partying at Dan Perez from Drag City’s house, and he put this record on [Half Baked]. It utterly destroyed me. I like this record too much!” says Sweeney, his eyes lighting up as he recalls the magic of this record. “He had a band called Rockin’ Horse… everything about him to me is aces. He’s starting to get discovered, but it’s pretty shocking how great it is.”

Since, Half Baked has been hard to shake. Like The Hard Quartet, which hasn’t strayed too far from the turntable platter since its release in October. With all its verve, vigour and fascinating songcraft, The Hard Quartet keeps revealing more with each listen. One of the many reasons it was an easy choice for our album of the year.

Sun 13: Firstly, congratulations of The Hard Quartet being Sun 13’s album of the year!

Matt Sweeney: “That’s awesome, man! That’s a huge, huge honour. Thanks a lot.”

S13: As the catalyst, how long had you been thinking about starting the band?

MS: “For a while. I had formerly proposed the idea five years ago. I recorded with [Stephen] Malkmus in Portland before the pandemic for his album, Traditional Techniques. The idea was that it was going to be live, acoustic to tape. The songs were so good that I listened to them once, and thought, ‘Okay, in the spirit of this, if this is gonna be this live thing, I’m gonna go for it’. The experience was really cool. We were playing with people that we had never played with before. Steve had never played with anybody other than me, so it was a really fun, risky thing.

“In that time, I remember saying that we should do a band with Emmett Kelly and Jim White. Steve said, ‘Emmett Kelly is amazing’. I was excited to know that Steve was a fan. I texted them that night, and they agreed! It took a while to get it together, but the idea was there. We probably had a month or two notice, when somehow – I can’t remember why it lined up so well or what gave me the impetus to ask everybody to come to New York – but I had everything lined up in the studio that I work at.

“This engineer that I work with, [Daniel Schlett], the studio was closing, and he’d let me know, so I was trying to do as much stuff there as possible. It was a great studio called Strange Weather, and it had this really fucking unusually good room for recording. Since it was only going to be there for another week, I thought it would be fun to get everybody together so we could at least play, because everybody’s schedules had lined up where we could do it.

“I’d said for everybody to bring in three songs to mess around with… nothing more defined than that idea. Steve being Steve, he’s a practicing songwriter… he just likes to write songs, so he had a bunch of stuff – a couple were actually completed. I had three ideas that I didn’t have any vocal lines for, and Emmett had presented two ideas… the session just kind of went like that. By the end of the first day, Daniel had been moving around mics and was already recording stuff. We kept on playing for those four days, and by the end of it, we had 11 things that were listenable ideas; definitely finished-sounding songs.”

S13: Wow! 

MS: “I arranged it so we could get back together in October… I think that was in May of last year. In October, we went to California and got to camp out at the studio in Malibu that I’ve worked out of a lot [Shanrgi-La], so I was able to just arrange it. [The timing] felt really lucky… shit just kept working out! We got to finish the record there, and then mix it in New York with Daniel, who moved to a smaller studio [SoundWork Intl.] that’s actually a couple blocks away from my house.

“Emmett flew in for the mixing of it. We were unusually involved in the mix without taking mixing credit, because Daniel really was the mixer. But Emmett’s got really great ears and technical know-how to mix the shit out of something that is really good.”

S13: A friend described The Hard Quartet as the ultimate hang record. It sounds like it was a very relaxed time in the studio…

MS: “Yeah, it was fun. Also, what was cool that it was super relaxed. But after those first sessions, it was like, ‘Oh, fuck, this is really good’. So when we went into the California sessions, the environment was so relaxed and so dreamy… it’s Malibu by the beach, and it’s basically a beach house! The studio’s got incredible gear, but it’s super chill. The house was built as a beach house in the ’40s or something like that, so you feel that when you’re there. But we also went in knowing that we had to fucking sing! We had to finish what we started.

“I shacked up by myself for four or five days beforehand to get it together. Similarly, during those sessions… they never dragged, but there were times where there was really intense work going on. I remember both Steve and Emmett being, like, ‘Okay, I’ll be gone for the next five hours… I’ll be over there somewhere surrounded by paper figuring stuff out for singing, for words and melodies’.

“I’m glad that the feeling that the hang aspect works and is captured in the record. We all kind of agreed it feels like a place or something, which is great. I love records that are like that… particularly with the California stuff. There’s a room that’s got a really nice window with a really nice view of big old fucking lawn with these old, gnarled, windswept trees. We saw a hawk land and run after a squirrel on foot, which is crazy! Stuff that you see while you’re tracking in the room that you’re tracking in, which used to be a sauna room that literally was a hot tub room! There are moments on the record where I really did feel like it was that room. Like Gripping the Riptide.”

S13: It’s such great closing track. I think the record has some of Stephen’s best work in years.

MS: “Yeah, he fucking brought it so hard. As long as I’ve known him and seen him play, he’s really… it’s funny, because he’s got this true mellow demeanour as a person. He’s unusually relaxed and confident in this sort of way that could be seen as loose. But the dude’s really intense. He’s a guitar player, and he’s a singer and songwriter. When he goes for that, he doesn’t fuck around, you know? I think his background – coming from hardcore and aggressive, wild music – also comes into play with how he does his thing. I feel like that was the idea of this band, like, ‘We could totally hang with that guy and meet that kind of intensity that he has’.

“Steve and I are really old friends. Same with Jim, and same with Emmett, but I had these different musical experiences with all three of [them] separately. I think all the other guys could say that, except for Steve and Emmett who hadn’t played together. But again, there was this unusual commonality in that Steve really knew Emmett’s stuff, and Emmett grew up being a fan of Steve’s guitar playing. So that was also a fun thing… to hook up Emmett and Steve.”

S13: Talking about the squirrel and the hawk. Did that have anything to do with your song, Killed By Death?

MS: (Laughs) “No. I mean, the Motörhead song… that expression has been used a bazillion times because it’s stupid and great. Also, there’s a Blue Oyster Cult song called O.D’d. on Life Itself, and when I was fucking around with getting the words, I said those two things and thought ‘Oh, that’s good.’”

S13: It’s probably my favourite song on the record. There’s a beautiful synergy with Jim.

MS: “His beat is unbelievable. He’s so good! There might actually be two drum tracks on there, maybe on the choruses. He did fucking cool shit on the record. It was so great to have him around the whole time. He wasn’t around for mixing, and he wasn’t around for a day or two of vocals. But other than that, he was always around. He’d come through and say, ‘I got an idea’, and I’d be thinking, ‘This is gonna be sick!’

“Jim is somebody who’s really about capturing what happened in the moment, but also him as a composer, he’s got great ideas. They’re nothing that you would have ever thought of, which is immensely satisfying. It was really cool getting to record with him in that way.”

S13: Everybody remembers the first time they saw the Dirty Three, right?

MS: “This guy named Joe Show, who was the receptionist at Matador in the early ’90s. His nickname was Joe Show because he went to every fucking show of consequence and knew about everything. He said, ‘You’re gonna have to see this band called the Dirty Three, they just got to town’. The Shadow Ring were also playing this show at The Cooler. It was maybe the Dirty Three’s second show in America. The Cooler was on the west side where there’s still a lot of drugs and craziness… slaughterhouses actually stank of blood outside The Cooler! It was an old, interesting club that I feel like people don’t talk about much, but they put on tons of great shows. Like this one… I saw the Dirty Three, and it blew my fucking mind completely.

“My band, Chavez, was about to play our first show ever the next day, and we had been rehearsing. In the van to Boston, I couldn’t stop talking about this band the Dirty Three. We get to the club in Boston, and the fucking Dirty Three are playing upstairs! I didn’t get to see them because we were playing at the same time, but I saw Jim and had a reason to say something to him. We stayed in touch because he ended up moving to New York, and really quickly after that we started hanging out. It’s a crazy, deep background. You know that if Jim White exists, then the world doesn’t suck.”

S13: Rio’s Song feels like the key that unlocks the album. Was that something that you’d had in the can for a while?

MS: “That’s a good question. I had that riff forever! I started fingerpicking in the late ’90s, and I’m sure sometime in the early ’00s I must have started messing around with that. I don’t know why I never used it, and then I forgot about it! I picked it up and wrote something out of that, but then the other parts got built around that riff. I think I got that together [thinking that] I needed to get a song in there. I wrote the music to it just like that, then I had to think of the melody. So it sat around for a month or two with me trying to shoehorn the melody in. It was process.”

S13: Speaking of melodies on Jacked Existence, I love the line, “Hide your high ways / Spit ’em out sideways”. There’s some real gunslinger argot there. It felt like you had that one ready in the chamber…

MS: (Laughs) “That’s cool. I thought that line was good, too. I’m glad you picked up on that one. That was another one where it kind of popped. It’s funny, the gunslinger shit, because this guy, Dave Ferguson, I had him in mind. He’s like the best wordsmith ever! The Songs of “Cowboy” Jack Clement is ridiculously good. Ferg was Johnny Cash’s engineer for the last 20-plus years of Johnny Cash’s life. He was the youngest of these old guys, but was very much one of them, matching in charisma and smarts and all this stuff with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

“I met him working with Rick Rubin on a Johnny Cash record [American V: A Hundred Highways], and he had this giant impact on me. He’s this salty dude but grew up about 20 miles outside of Nashville, and the way he sings and the way he plays and talks, he’s really sharp and funny in his language. It’s funny, because he writes songs, but he’s not known as producer or engineer. Within a circle in Nashville, he’s a star in his own right.”

S13: You’ve worked with so many different artists over the years, do you think that put you in good stead to make a record like this?

MS: “For sure. I was able to get that fancy studio in L.A. because I got to do all this stuff! (laughs) I’m super fortunate in that regard. Also just to be able to be focused on getting something done. It took me a long time to learn how to be focused, for lack of a better word, and it was through being asked to play so many different projects, because I never fucking planned on it! I was the weird dude who’s in the band Chavez, but that’s all I did back then.

“Later in my 20s, when I learned how to finger pick, just being able to know how to do that, people started asking me to play… Will Oldham started asking me to play, and that kind of made me jump off into the thing. Rick Rubin heard me play guitar, and so he just wanted me to play on his records, so then that kind of grew from there. When I walked in there, I wouldn’t say that I was very focused, but because I had never been asked to be focused… it’s hard. But when you’re in this crazy situation with very little studio experience really playing on some big ass intense record, you have to figure your shit out in real time. (laughs) It’s improv’ and it just turned out that I could do it.

“What I love about The Hard Quartet, the way they play and the way that I think about music… I was in my early 20s when I heard Jim and Steve. It’s also cool because I could be an adult, professional musician with a bunch of crazy experiences, and it’s these people that I’ve been impressed with for a really long time who ended up being peers. [They were] ahead of me back then, but I got to quickly play shows with them, so there’s definitely a familiarity.”

S13: Do you think your immediate surroundings had a subconscious result on the record?

MS: “I wouldn’t want to jinx it or make it seem like all this stuff is necessary for a record to be good, but when it’s that nice and we are all commenting about how goddamn nice it was to be there, for sure. We were swimming every day! We were talking to Jim a lot about it, because it feels pretty Australian up there. Malibu has some beautiful beaches, and it certainly didn’t hurt.

“It’s an odd one… Steve’s daughter talked about the cognitive dissonance of just being in Malibu, because it’s a strange place. The beauty is utterly, crushingly overwhelming. The particulars of the place and who lives there, and why and what they get up to is a whole other side of things. Jeff Bezos has a private beach there. Being that close to privilege and power… since I’m sitting here talking about it, that also comes to mind and is there when you’re there.”

S13: Australia feels like the perfect destination for the band’s first tour. Was it an obvious choice?

MS: “Yeah, totally. It’s funny, because what’s cool is that, because of our relationship with each other, we don’t need to talk a lot about what we’re doing when we’re doing it. If there ever needs to be a reference said, it would be The Saints. (laughs) It’s pretty hilarious. You can pretty much say ‘The Saints’ about anything with this group of people and whatever that means will be understood within the context of whatever it is that we’re working on.” (laughs)

S13: Will there be a second record?

MS: “Oh, yeah, absolutely. What’s been on my mind lately is when a good time to record is. I’d really like to go back to the beach and do it there. That’s totally on my mind right now. We already went in [during] the summer. We had to shoot two videos, and everybody was super busy, but we did four days where everybody could be together. Steve had a good idea and said, ‘Why don’t we just book studio time, and we’ll do everything’. We played a bunch of music, and I think we got at least two songs that sounded really good to me.”

The Hard Quartet is out now via Matador Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.