Audiopile Review: Critic Sasha Frere-Jones once said the only thing that made Of Montreal an indie rock band was the people who listened to them. He was talking, we think, about the fate of groups that confirm a following in the broad church of indie rock before converting to a more electronically danceable gospel. In other words, if your audience demographic is indie rockers, you’re an indie rock band for life, no matter what your music ends up sounding like. This kinda applies to Melbourne’s HTRK, but it also kinda doesn’t. Sure, Sheila and Bruce HTRK (not their real names) came out rockin’ before their indie became increasingly ‘tronic. But they’ve always been a sleazy indie act at their core. And yet, from the start, their audience has included a remarkable number of experimental music boffins and underground avant-ravers. What is it about this specific beat combo that so appeals to fans of the weird and wonderful? Well, some artists are just so damn good that they transcend genre. Not everyone has an interest in progressive rock, but we all love the godlike Peter Hammill, obviously. We ain’t idiots. That isn’t exactly how it is with HTRK, though. Rather, this is a group which has more than a little of that thing Kevin Shields says he had and then lost. Namely: ‘It’. You know! That x-factor, which can transform the recognizable into something uncanny and otherworldly. You’ll likely hear what we mean the moment you drop the needle on HTRK’s newly reissued, Rowland S. Howard-produced 2009 debut ‘Marry Me Tonight’. That prowling, swampy bass and loping, baggy beat, those sultry, gravelled vocals… It’s all somehow familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Kinda sounds like a foreshadowing of Kim Gordon’s solo career, though the real heads might point to Leslie Winer, that caustic godmother of trip-hop. But, as with all great bands, it’s easy to identify HTRK’s influences but ultimately pointless because that’ll give you no real insight into what makes the music so special. One listen to ‘Marry Me Tonight’ should be enough to convince you of just how special HTRK’s music is. And then you have the group’s whole discography ahead of you.

***

HTRK step into their 21st year on reflective terms, launching a series of collaborations, covers/remixes, installations, and performances alongside the new repress of their full-length debut, Marry Me Tonight. First released in 2009 via Blast First Petite, the album saw its first vinyl pressing in 2015 via Ghostly International and has since been out of stock. In late 2024, Marry Me Tonight becomes available in limited edition pink and black vinyl, also finally on streaming services.

Few groups in history elevate mood to such singular, smoldering supremacy as the Australian duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, aka HTRK (or “hate rock” if informed). Across two decades of work and wounds, HTRK’s sound has shape-shifted between densities and intensities, noise and nakedness, but never wavered in its delicate poetic gravity. In HTRK’s sound world, cavernous reverberations of dub techno are mixed with frosted post-punk motifs and the gravelly imperfections of industrial, reimagined in the setting of a dingy basement.

Like all HTRK albums, Marry Me Tonight was singular in sound and circumstance. It’s the only album the outfit recorded from start to finish as a trio, and it’s the only HTRK record that bears the co-production stamp of Rowland S. Howard. Breathy, caustic, and rife with contradiction, Marry Me Tonight took the raw material recorded on 2005’s Nostalgia and transformed it into a pop record — pop that buckled and warped beneath the glare of Howard, fellow producer Lindsay Gravina, and the HTRK trio: Jonnine Standish, Nigel Yang and Sean Stewart. Howard died at the end of 2009; Stewart died the year after. Things would never be the same. The band would carry on and reach new heights despite it all, but as a trio, this is their definitive document.