Odesza on the early days of SoundCloud and why Australia is their second home

The world loves Odesza – their latest album A Moment Apart debuted at #3 on the Billboard Top 200 and topped the iTunes Electronic chart in 12 countries, and they’ve clocked over two billion streams across Pandora, Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube. But the Seattle duo are definitely playing favourites when it comes to Australia.

Making their Australian debut supporting RÜFÜS in 2014, Clayton Knight and Harrison Mills returned for headline shows in 2015, 2016 and again this year, plus they’ll be back for Laneway 2018. And local audiences can’t get enough –they’ve sold out almost every Australian headline show they’ve played, including two consecutive nights at the Enmore last month.

They’re not just paying lip service to the famously inflatable Australian ego, either –they’ve put their money where their mouth is. Australian artists including RÜFÜS, Golden Features, and Yahtzel (plus Kiwi Troy Samuela) have all found a home on Mills and Knight’s Foreign Family Collective label; Aussies Mansionair and RY X contribute vocals on A Moment Apart, alongside names like Leon Bridges and Regina Spektor; and in a Reddit AMA last week, when the duo were asked to nominate who they’d most like to work with, there was only one answer: Tame Impala frontman “Kevin Motherfuckin’ Parker”.

“Australia’s turned into our second home slowly,” says Clayton Knight, on the phone from London, where they’re touring with yet more Aussies – support acts Hayden James and MUTO. “Everyone we’ve met over there has been super friendly and warm right off the bat. The music community’s pretty small. They all kind of know each other. It just [feels] a little more family oriented.”

“You don’t have a more open mind than the Mansionair guys, who are really willing to try and experiment with stuff, [more] than a lot of more established artists in the US. It’s hard to get someone outside of their box… Yeah, Australians seem to have no problem doing that.”

Knight and Mills met at college and started kicking ideas around in 2012, at first as influenced by shoegaze, M83 and the grunge heritage of the Pacific Northwest as by the intricate textures of the booming bedroom-producer scenes on SoundCloud.

“When SoundCloud first started picking up, it did feel like there was this huge, kind of new buzz in music,” Knight says. “There was so much creative content and so many new ideas being shared in different ways. It was kind of like a golden age of music, especially for producers.”

Odesza built an audience initially through their deep involvement with SoundCloud, helped along by their status as a favourite sync option for snowsports and adventure sports footage. Between free streaming and ski videos, the pair quickly developed a pragmatic approach to distribution and monetisation, even releasing their first album for free.

“The compensation for an artist has changed pretty drastically for the past couple of years,” notes Knight. “It used to be people could make a living off album sales – that’s not the case anymore. You gotta tour, you gotta find other ways to make that money. For us early on, a little sync licence for a ski video that paid 1,000 bucks was a big deal. That was our food money.”

Their pop songcraft has been proven with tracks like the buoyant breakout ‘Say My Name’ from In Return as well as the euphoric single from A Moment Apart, ‘Higher Ground’ (which is this week’s Hot 100 #1 Breaker after a huge bump in triple j spins).

But Odesza’s blend of cinematic scale, glossy production values and somewhat abstract structures means they don’t fit easily into most radio formats, and Knight admits that from the beginning, he and Mills never really bothered with a radio strategy. Instead, their focus was on building an online audience, a strong design brand and a killer live presence, and their success grew organically from that.

“We never thought radio would even be something that would be a serious consideration,” he says. “Really, after we released stuff, we put focus on a live show… We’ve been pretty surprised how far this thing’s gone.”

Odesza releases (and Foreign Family ones) all share design elements, most notably the distinctive logos on their cover art and accompanying visuals (developed largely by Mills, who has a design background). Knight says this developed early on, but it’s more than just a marketing exercise –for Odesza, visuals are their most important tool for enhancing the experience of not only the live setting but also online fan engagement more broadly.

“We took a lot of time to make sure the video and any visual element that we were using with the audio was curated and done in line with the music as much as possible… The streaming world has now kind of made music a lot more visual.”

“A lot of times, people will just skim through a playlist or track and it may be the picture that catches their eye. That kind of gives you a little advantage over anything else. It’s an extremely important element and I think maybe undervalued a little bit these days.

“You build these worlds and the visual element is very much a part of that…. We spend a lot of time doing these tour videos and chat videos and other video assets.”

And part of the fan experience is, quite simply easy access to the music. Knight says their label, Counter Records, was understanding about their insistence that their albums be available for free on SoundCloud, where it all began.

“They knew early on that SoundCloud was a big part of our audience, so if we were to not put stuff up [there] for free … they felt it may get a few more listens here but it would shut out a huge amount of people and I don’t think that would have been the right move,” Knight explains.

“We made it pretty clear that we’re going to do it. It’s part of the process. It’s part of our DNA that’s kind of built in. They’ve been super helpful though, as far as a label experience goes, I don’t think we could have asked for a better one over the last two releases.”

Now, Knight and Mills have more freedom than ever to do things their way.

“We want to release some more material, especially live material. Giving that away is something we talked about, so I think, yeah giving back to the fan base that come to the shows and pays good money to see you would be really nice. I’m all about that kind of free form of creative art.”

A Moment Apart is out via Pod/Inertia Music in ANZ and ROW on Counter/Ninja Tune, and ‘Higher Ground’ is at radio now.