On Hatchie’s last album, 2022’s ‘Giving The World Away’, it looked like her pop star ambitions had come to life. Big producers, glossy visuals, a move to Los Angeles, a lot going on; now, on her third offering, ‘Liquorice’, Hatchie is back to her roots but sounding dreamier than ever.

‘Giving The World Away’ existed in a very different universe, all bright lights and the big city; where we meet Hatchie in the ‘Liquorice’ era is instead in a sunny field, her singing to cows on the back of a tractor.

“I really wanted [‘Giving The World Away’] to feel massive and a lot darker, because I felt like the content of the album was a little more introspective and dealing with my identity, and the struggles that you go through when you're in your 20s,” says Hatchie (or Harriette to her mates). “But with this album, it feels a lot more joyful and playful. This one is mostly about falling in love, and it just felt right for those visuals to be a little lighter and fluffier.”

That’s not to say the journey to this joy has been easy. On her last album cycle, Harriette spent a brief period living in LA, before seemingly inevitably coming back to her home country of Australia, first in Brisbane before heading south to Melbourne. The move prompted a shift in the Hatchie soundscape, away from the 90s acid house and Madchester she was reaching for on ‘Giving The World Away’ and back to her shoegazey dream pop roots.

“I was kind of at a crossroads after the last album, figuring out what to do,” she says. “I was pretty burnt out, which was something that I did to myself, I think. I was spending a lot of time in Australia after being overseas a lot on tour. I moved back in with my parents, with my husband, and we were digesting the last five years, I guess. Honestly, I was in a really bad place in between the albums, and writing this album kind of helped me get out of that. I feel like it gave me a lot of clarity. I went into this album really wanting to experiment and just go with whatever came out of me. I was like, just write, see what happens. Whatever comes out, you don't have to show anyone. You don't have to release it. I think that really helped as an exercise to open things up creatively and helped me hit the reset button in a way.”

‘Liquorice’’s conception was much more DIY too, no flashy writing sessions (as she describes it, which is true, her last record saw her drop tracks co-written with Dan Nigro at the height of his ‘Sour’ success), just penned from home. The credits list is short and sharp, almost entirely done by Harriette, her husband and longtime collaborator Joe Agius, then Jay Som’s Melina Duterte on production, and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on drums.

“Melina felt a bit different from the other suggestions that we'd had; she wasn't like a classic, LA pop producer. She's a musician, she has her own band,” says Harriette. “And Stella is friends with Melina, so she did [drums]. She smashed it all out in a day. She's such a machine. She hadn't really even heard the songs before, and just listened to them once, and was like, okay, got it and smashed it out. It was crazy. I've never seen anyone like that.”

The result is something intimate and cosy, but equally bright and playful. ‘Liquorice’ is just polished enough, not straying far from the initial demos. Sonically, she’s back where she started, reverting to similar influences she had on debut album ‘Keepsake’ and early EP ‘Sugar & Spice’ – think The Sundays, Cocteau Twins and The Cranberries – but elevated and more grown up. Tracks like ‘Only One Laughing’ and ‘Someone Else’s News’ feel classically Hatchie, airy and whimsical without feeling too teenage.

The album’s central concept is back to basics, too, exploring that evergreen feeling of fancying someone. The title comes from Harriette’s own renaming of a French kiss (“Liquorice is all twisty and sweet and salty,” she says, “That song encapsulates the whole album for me”), while the content draws mostly from fictional love stories.

“Honestly, I had more references that were movies and trying to retell the emotions of those,” she explains. “Things like Before Sunrise, Blue Valentine, Francis Ha, The Worst Person in the World, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Any of those tragic romances were kind of scratching an itch for me, and so I wanted to recreate that feeling that they were conveying, because I thought they did a really amazing job of illustrating the complicated feelings that come with falling in love and falling out of love.

“There's still so much to explore there for me, even though I've been in a relationship and married for years, you kind of never forget those feelings, and there are little sprinkles of them throughout being in a relationship, even if it's a really great, happy, stable relationship. So I think I will always find that fascinating.”

Throughout her discography, Hatchie’s found her sonic scrapbook increasingly filled with 90s genre trends, from the wistful dream pop and hazy shoegaze of her early releases, through the darker-edged synth pop and rave-influenced beats of her follow-up, it was only a matter of time before Britpop came into the picture. It’s evident on lead track ‘Lose It Again’, as well as ‘Wonder’, that the swirly guitars and elongated-vowel melodies of a certain pair of volatile brothers had rubbed off on Hatchie too.

“With ‘Lose It Again’, Joe kept calling it the Gallagher moment,” she recalls. “When we were finishing it off with Melina and tracking all the guitars, I was like, I swear it's the exact same pacing as either ‘Don't Look Back in Anger’ or ‘Champagne Supernova’. So then we just edged the BPM to actually exactly match whichever one it was, just so it'd be exactly the same feeling. And then I guess I just end up singing like that automatically. I sing those songs, especially ‘Lose It Again’, in a different voice. I was really quite influenced by my friend's old band called Green Buzzard, and he was influenced by a lot of Britpop, especially Oasis and Blur. So it's kind of like this trickle-down effect from being influenced by a band influenced by Britpop. There's such a crossover with that with shoegaze and dream pop. It kind of colours in some of the blank spots.”

While the last year has seen a resurgence of 90s bands, as alternative acts from the decade achieve legend status, Hatchie was far ahead, letting the era shape her sonic palette long before it made its way onto For You pages. But what is it about the 1990s that keep Harriette coming back to them?

“I think partly by default, because I grew up in the 90s with parents and siblings who listened to The Corrs and Shania Twain and Spice Girls and everyone else from the 90s like that, so that's seeped its way into my influences without realising. We listened to a lot of that music, like The Cranberries and The Cardigans, as well, that had really harmony-focused records. I guess it's also just my favourite as well, without realising. I do love all that shoegaze and dream pop and even mainstream 90s pop, I think is so amazing. I mean, when I started the project, I was like, I want to sound like these bands. But these days it's not trying to sound like a particular era. It just happens.”

Harriette may have set less expectations for herself this time around, but as a result, ‘Liquorice’ is pure, distilled Hatchie. Leaning into her playful side and drawing on lifelong influences, ‘Liquorice’ feels direct from the heart.

“I was really satisfied with the fact that it felt a little more unserious, which was probably one of the only things that I actually did plan about this album. I wanted to be less serious and melodramatic. I just wanted to be more free and fun, because I'm not a super serious person myself. It felt like my other albums didn't quite match up to my personality as much as they could. That last album was so dark; I was like, 'I feel like this is all coming across as me being this synth-pop, girly'. I listen to a lot more pop and fun, lighthearted indie-rock. I wanted it to reflect that.”

Taken from the November 2025 issue of Dork. Hatchie's album 'Liquorice' is out 7th November.