Eora/Sydney indie-rock outfit The Tambourine Girls have returned with their fourth album, Hold Your Horses, a beautifully melodic record shaped by loss, friendship and the process of finding a way forward.
At its emotional core is the death of much-loved band member and close friend Nick Weaver, but Hold Your Horses never feels weighed down by grief. Instead, its airy synths, warm melodies and driving indie-rock hooks give the album a sense of movement and light, even as Simon Relf wrestles with absence, memory and everything that comes with losing someone so central to your life.
Recorded entirely in a shed on the quiet outskirts of Armidale, surrounded by bushland, the album was produced and engineered by bassist Pat Harris, with mixing split between Nick Franklin and Tony Buchen, and mastering by Matt Stewart.
Relf has described the record as effectively “two albums distilled into one”. What initially threatened to become a collection dominated by loss gradually evolved into something broader, allowing space for anger and sadness, but also friendship, resolution and the joy of having shared a life with someone. Some of these songs date back more than a decade, while others emerged as Relf, Harris and Carlos Adura began making music together again. There are inherited guitars, literary inspirations, spontaneous late-night recordings and memories of Weaver woven throughout.
The band will be launching the album at Bootleggers in Sydney this Friday night (18th September). Get along and support live music. Tickets HERE.
To celebrate the release of Hold Your Horses, lead singer Simon Relf takes us through the album, track by track. So, press <play> and read on.
The Tambourine Girls – Hold Your Horses – Track by Track
“She Came Home Last Night”
This is the oldest song on the album, and the only one that Nick Weaver played on. That’s him playing keyboard, singing doo-wop, and hitting the tambourine. I think we recorded it in 2015, and there really was a time when my wife (then my girlfriend) had a suitcase sitting by the door. I think she’d just come back from a trip to New York, but it seemed to stay there an awful long time. Either way, she hates this song.
“All Substance No Style”
I was high on some painkillers after a work-related injury, and I was listening to ‘St Petersburg’ by Supergrass. Both those things had me feeling pretty good, and I wrote this song in about 20 minutes. I love Carlos’ drums and the London Calling vibes. The lyrics are pretty good too.
“Trauma Bond”
This is an old song. I’ve been working on it for about 15 years, but I only took it to the band earlier this year. I really love the bombastic drum sound, which was Pat’s idea, and I think it makes the whole thing work. I was trying to channel Nick for that guitar break, and I really like it. Isn’t every bond a trauma bond?
“Underwater”
This is probably the most collaborative song we’ve ever written. I remember Pat playing those chords on his keyboard, over a drum beat he’d prepared earlier. In the room, there was a speaker with a label on it that read “comparator”, so I started singing “com par A ter..” Then Pat says, “That speaker makes everything sound like it’s underwater.” So I’m singing “ComparAtor Underwater” which becomes “Did they make her Underwater?” No magic at all.
“In The Morning’
I remember it was maybe a year or so after Nick died, and I was having a day with someone who really threw into sharp relief those who are no longer with us. I mean, this guy was really pissing me off. Anyway, I went out to dinner with some friends, and I knew I was going home to an empty house, so I bought a service station coffee and a bottle of wine, and wrote this song. I had inherited a few guitars from Nick, and I was playing around with different tunings on some of them, and that’s where the harmony for this song comes from.
“Wrong Way”
I was sitting at home reading from a book of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. I love her work so much! I don’t know if it’s because I can listen to recordings of her recitations, but to me it has the pure purpose of elemental stone, and she is my favourite poet. The night I wrote these words was the night before our first band get-together after Nick died. The first time the three of us would make music together. Maybe I should have known that they were a song waiting to happen, but these words didn’t feel like anything in that moment. I don’t know how to describe it, but everything felt unreal before we started again.
Nick was the reason we all knew each other. He was the one who had introduced us to each other, and to so much else besides. He was our sense of humour, our sense of music, and our sense of each other. I guess this song is a self-warning of the dark places you can go in grief, which is funny, because it’s also the first song that made us feel like a band again.
“Oscar Wildlife”
I started writing this in 2013 in a flat in London, when Deep Sea Arcade had moved there for 6 months. I think we all knew that band was over, at least in that form, and it had been a particularly long winter, and the whole town felt beat. To make matters worse, I was reading And The Ass Saw The Angel by Nick Cave. Not really a recipe for positive thinking… I finished it last year after one of my late-night calls/sad parties with Tia. Not much of the original song survives, and, in a lot of ways the song is from her perspective. That image of “raining” in your dreams while they “howl on the roof”. So close and so real, but so impossibly far.
“Clown In The Dirt”
This has had a number of incarnations, but I wrote it in my notebook on the balcony of The Pacific Hotel in Yamba, looking out over the ocean, and thinking about Tom Waits’ ‘Heart Attack’ and ‘Vine’. This particular recording was late one night in the shed. We were a little high, listening to the band Reef, and laughing a lot when Carlos started playing this groove. Nick Garbett overdubbed those spaced-out sounds with his trumpet at our friend Jordan Ireland’s studio, and there it is. Came from another planet, and we were glad to meet it.
“Glimmerman”
This is a 100% Pat Harris production. He makes a lot of beautiful instrumental music which feels like a big “there there”, and I asked him if he’d like to put something on the album to give it a breath. Our albums are always so songy… I love it when it comes on.
“Love Song”
I love this song, “Love Song”; it’s about love songs, and love and songs.
“Sad Parties”
Nick died during COVID, and so during the lockdown I used to stay up late on the phone with Tia (his love) talking and drinking and crying, and we got to calling these phone calls “sad parties”. Sometimes we’d break for an hour or so, and I wrote this on the piano during one of those breaks. The recording is a first take, and I think it’s the first time Pat ever played it, which is why you hear me ask if I should “count it in, in case”? I didn’t think we’d end up using it.
Hold Your Horses is out now – grab a copy HERE
