It’s mandatory for anyone writing about Collarbones to mention the long-distance nature of their working relationship—a  fan-favourite mythology being that the pair met on a Hilary Duff forum in their teen years. That might be more endearing than the reality (it was a post-rock messageboard….boring!) but by now Collarbones—Adelaide’s Travis Cook and Sydney’s Marcus Whale—have eclipsed any meme-ified origin stories. Any self respecting devotee of boundary pushing electronic pop should have some kind of familiarity with their music; their listener demographic is a many-hued combination of local music buffs, cross-over Flume fans, and the rare individual who discovered their music via totally random Spotify algorithms. It’s not so controversial to suggest they’re on the way to being as adored by the crowds here at home as say, The Presets were 10 years ago.

The new single, ‘A.I.’, is their first in roughly three years following the successful Return, an album that spurred an unexpected collaboration with EDM giant Flume. ‘A.I.’ follows that moment by sounding as brazen, beat heavy and intoxicating as possible, going straight for the throat. It’s full-blooded and sonically unrelenting, a far cry from the skittering, quietly tuneful and glitchy electronic experiments of their first album. In 2018, Collarbones exists primarily as a vehicle for the pop ambitions of Marcus and Travis, an evolution that was at first explored tentatively on Return and more overtly in this unabashed banger. The exhaustive nature of adolescent longing, ego and lustful abandon is neatly captured in this maximalist new track, accompanied by an equally compelling and disorienting video, directed/styled/choreographed/envisioned by Sydney dignitary and music artist Gussy. We met with Marcus to talk about the vagueness of our collective future, and why Travis is pathologically unable to attend interviews.

Jonno Revanche: Just to be transparent, we should probably mention that we’ve known each other for ages. When we first met in Adelaide you were mostly devoted to Collarbones, then BV if I recall, then your solo work, and this is the first collarbones single in almost three years, right? How has your working relationship with Travis evolved since then?

Marcus Whale: Yeah…it’s the first single in a while, but we have been making music this entire time. Travis sometimes goes through these sprees of productivity and makes a huge volume of very strange music that he uploads to YouTube. I spend time writing songs and sometimes trying to transform these Travis vignettes into songs.

J: So you’re essentially in a relationship with YouTube.

M:  Well, in short… yes. But it’s a YouTube that answers, and has an emotional core.

J: What would you say is the overarching “mood” of these new songs? Can you unravel the new single and video for all those unfamiliar?

M:  I’m sort of obsessed with the feeling of longing, maybe because it’s when I am in longing that I feel like the most fully alive version of myself? Anyway, this song is about the private, intimate solitude of longing for an absent person. It’s about the time I was catfished at 17 by someone whose identity I still don’t know.

J: Longing is a particularly queer emotion I feel, always operating on the premise that reality will either be disappointing—or even dangerous—given our conditions. Is it also in some way a romanticisation of control or self-narrative? Like everything can remain uncompromised?

M: Well, exactly. I’ve always found the deferral and distance of longing to be the main way I am erotic in my life? Arrival feels like a disruption of myself, maybe.

J: How do you feel that manifests in the video? Feel free to talk about the creative process behind it too, as I know Gussy was the mastermind.

M: Hmm, I think a lot of the images Gus chose made me think of circumstances in which another person is either watching or in the middle distance. There are these beautiful moments of choreography in which Gus themself, as a dancer in the video, mirrors and then interpolates my movement. We spoke a lot about that scene in Ex Machina in which that guy dances in coordination with one of the androids, and we agreed it was something we found both compelling and deeply creepy…

J: Wow. So which one are you?

M: That’s the question I guess, who is moving who, who’s possessing who, yadda yadda. We’re all, I guess, inaccessible to each other in some way. That’s something I think about a lot, the futility of actual connection, but then the joy of trying…

J: Tea! Do you feel like the way you’ve written about desire and projection has changed much over the years?

M: You know, I’ve gone back and looked at stuff that Collarbones has made, and other work I’ve done from years ago, and I realise I have kind of been on different versions of the same thing probably my whole life. I did a lot of stuff about haunting and ghosts that I now realise is just about desire. Maybe I am more literal these days?

J: So this album is called Futurity—a word that inspires thoughts of optimism, weirdly, given so many feel they don’t have a tangible future to look forward to. Care to explain?

M: I think there is something radical in imaging a future where one is made opaque or inaccessible. The types of future I am singing about on the songs are ones that are romantic or wild or implausible, things that maybe are considered frivolous by most people. But maybe there is just no choice but to reject the conditions of the present. These ideas are all fully lifted from José  Munoz’s idea of the utopian drive of queerness, which feels like such a buzzwordy thing now.

J: Go off José you good bitch!

M: Yes, go off. RIP.

J: How does it feel to return to “pop music” after not doing it for so long?

M: Pop music is kind of hard work for me! And Travis I think. There are a lot of rules. But at the same time, there’s all this power in embodying and possessing that framework. I think there’s a lot of immaturity in my journaling, and that goes straight into the songs… the easiest part is finding things to write about. But then producing the songs is a slog sometimes.

J: There’s a lot of talk about possession in this interview. Were there any pop songs that influenced this new work?

M: Ummm, well this song was mostly produced and written in 2016 and we were very into Flume, but also the conflicting vibe of glory and bombasticism in the face of global catastrophe on Anohni’s Hopelessness. There’s a lot of different club music in the DNA of the production I think that mixes into a quite strange blend. Hamish Dixon co-produced it which eventually treated that blend in a clearer and more powerful way.

J: It seems like you’ve worked with a lot of new people in the creation of this new single.  What prompted this—did you feel an urge to expand your horizons in some way?

M: Yes! We were compelled to put more juice into what has been traditionally quite a DIY project, try to actually make pop music you know, which in the past was a bit outside our repertoire. The fact that we were working with Flume around that time was definitely an influence. The idea of making something as big and glorious as that becomes… alluring… when you look at your own pithy achievements.

J: I feel we need to unearth the secrets of these songs. What, in your life, more recently inspired the songs? Does crushing remain important to you even as you grow older? Maybe pop music allows us to hold onto our juvenility.

M: That’s how I see it—at least we can dream. That is, maybe, part of the distance and deferral. I think it’s being okay with things being impermanent, or constantly fugitive. Maybe there is a bit of arrested development in being optimistic in this way.

J: I think, for me, crushing and pop music are experienced in more complicated ways as an adult because I think the delightful ugliness of encountering someone else’s vulnerability (and being entrusted with it in a sometimes terrifying world) has finally eclipsed projection for me. Like, I can appreciate intimacy or connection with less abandon, not that I necessarily miss it, because that’s an important part of development, but it’s steadied now, or maybe functions more practically.

M: I don’t know if I have achieved your level of circumspection, but I am at least aware that what I am doing is fantasist.

J: Let’s wrap this interview for now. To your adoring fans, what would you have them know about this song, and album that you haven’t already said? What is the tea?

M: Hahaha errr….well, in the song I cast my catfish as an AI, as in the movie AI, as in the Android in AI played by Haley Joel Osment who is created to be loved by parents bereft of a child. It felt like the perfect analogy for the artificiality of the situation that I was in, this intense love for someone I interacted with only in text, that still felt so real. The first time I saw it I only saw the final part, the final day when the AI has his last day with his mother. It made me cry!

Listen to Collarbones’ new single, ‘A.I.’ here.