Track By Track: Ha The Unclear's New 'Astigmatic!' EP

Based in Tāmaki Makaurau with roots in Ōtepoti, Ha the Unclear unveiled their Astigmatic! EP late last week, the team of Michael Cathro, Paul Cathro, Theodore Francis and Stu Harwood's first new bundle of tunes in two years. SRN hit earworm 'Cumberland Street (Astigmatic)' and boisterously catchy pub rocker 'The Cold' are joined by three brand new songs, a tidy package recorded with ace producer / engineer Tom Healy at his home studio. Ha The Unclear pack fizzy, Swingers-level hooks into five songs radiating clear love for Aotearoa's alt-rock and new wave pop heritage, with more than a touch of nostalgia for their Dunedin days.

Treating fans up and down the motu to a nationwide tour this November and December, the group's Michael Cathro generously spilled the beans about every single tune on Astigmatic!...

Ha The Unclear - Astigmatic! Tour

Friday 6th November – Crown Hotel, Ōtepoti / Dunedin
Friday 13th November – Whammy, Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland
Saturday 14th November – Space Academy, Ōtautahi / Christchurch
Friday 4th December – Meow, Pōneke / Wellington*

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR
*Tickets on sale HERE

Cumberland St (Astigmatic)

The song came from living back in Dunedin after being away for a long time. Cumberland Street is this part of State Highway 1 that stretches all the way through the city from South to North (and vice versa), past the hospital, the University, and Radio One, with heaps of traffic lights. The way the phasing is set up, you can get all greens without having to stop once, but your timing has to be very particular. The song started off being about these small joys. I was living in North Dunedin and I picked up the idea and melody during some daycare dropoff runs down the valley. I had the chorus idea already from a very early memory of pointing out stars to my parents on a Dunedin night, not realising they were just streetlights on the opposite hill. I’ve played around with astigmatism as an idea in a few songs, but here I liked how it framed the verse as illusory; like happiness with barbs. This might not have been a single if our guitarist Theo hadn’t argued for it to be a studio focus. I love that our producer Tom dropped the original demo synths in there.

The Cold

This came, I think, out of a bit of frustration with the creative process. Songwriting, for me, can become jigsaw-puzzling and problem-solving and at times overcomplicated, but this one was about ripping the dried up lid off to get the sauce out. We tried a few different ways of instrumentalising the repeating riff, but in the end the dumbest and funnest way was just to all yell it. Kudos to Paul and Theo, they had to cope with probably the most syllable-heavy BV in the chorus I’ve ever given them. I think originally the song was a few clicks slower, so they really had to spit them out. Tom has a real knack for hearing the hooks and embellishing them, so I like how he leaned into that here.

Earth Grazer

I grabbed the first line from another poem or song out of a notebook I had, because I thought mishearing “in a quarter of an hour” for “for a quarter of an hour” was a funny set-up. Around the same time I was reading about meteors for some reason and I hadn’t heard the term Earth Grazer before (a meteor that enters and then exits Earth’s atmosphere) so it stuck with me. I liked the idea that there could be this meaningful, brief connection, and for it to exist only then and never again — the meteor came so close but never hit the Earth. We wrote this really abstract bridge for it and funnily enough I think Theo misheard my guitar notes when he wrote his part, which made it way more ambiguous, but we kept it because it suited the kind of meteor entry we were going for. I also remember Theo wanting to get Stu to just rip the drums in the studio with whatever came up for that section.

The Good Times Always End in Tears

This was written in a room I rented in a shared music space with friends down on the Dunedin wharf. It’s such a great space and has fostered a lot of community and incredible music and I had really just pleasant times with my friends there. So, I can see a lot of the lyrics came from being there — the place opened out onto the rooftop where we’d sit out in the sun. We occasionally had black-backed gulls nesting on the roof with their chicks, so the sound of seabirds was really embedded in being there. In retrospect, I think I was foreshadowing having to leave, as not long after writing it I returned to Auckland.

Mountains We’ve Made

This probably would have never made it out of my demos folder if Theo hadn’t become attached to it and advocated for its existence. It went through a few different iterations in the demo stages and there must be six or seven different versions, with different backing vocals and lyrics in different places. When we brought it in to Tom, I think he really saw some potential in it and it was a different kind of song for us to try out. We had to write the bridge on the fly in-studio and I remember having a bit of trouble with it initially, until we started getting into Modest Mouse territory and then I knew everything would be OK.

'Astigmatic!' is out now on major streaming platforms.