Brisbane’s pop-punk upstarts Two Times Shy are soaring lofty heights as they let loose their …
The alt world may know Jackson Bentley and Ben Heidrich for their respective band’s Rumours and The Daily Chase, but the legends are here to flip any preconceived notions you may have of them on their heads.
MORE: FANGZ: Our Top 5 Bands Playing Halloween Hysteria // FROM CRISIS TO COLLAPSE: Talk Us through Their Essential Deserted Island Albums REVIEWS: PRIDELANDS: Light Bends // FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY: Oh What The Future Holds // UNDEROATH: Voyeurist
They’re doing this with Oddbo¥, a metal/rap crossover so good we reckon it’d make our Lord and saviour Fred Durst proud as punch. We caught up with the duo to chat about their recently released debut, Cut from the Crypt, plans for the coming months and more.
Hysteria: How’d Oddbo¥ come to life?
Ben: For me, it was a curiosity in music production and wanting to dive deeper into the art. I’ve always played live music with JB [Jackson Bentley], and we’ve recorded together in studios, but the opportunity to record our own stuff was very exciting.
Jackson: I had managed to escape one of Melbourne’s lockdown’s to go live back in Wagga Wagga with my family for a while until the world got itself together. I ended up spending a lot of time at Ben’s place listening to all the new music he had been writing, I felt inspired, and it grew from there.
How are you both finding working on the project differs from your respective bands?
Ben: No project is better and/or respected more than the other, but they are vastly different in terms of the process. JB and I are probably the weirdest members of each of our bands, so when you leave us together to write a song from scratch, you’re asking for trouble…
Jackson: I don’t think I could word it better than Ben! Both our bands are as important as the other, but being the two … I guess more “out there” creatives … in our other bands, Oddbo¥ was always going to be something unique.
Congratulations on the recent release of Cut from the Crypt! Let’s dig into what inspired it.
Ben: I sat down in my home studio and just started building dark sounds. I wasn’t even planning to add guitars as I was experimenting with sound design for my movie projects. But I ended up writing some drum parts, added 808 kicks and played a few guitar riffs over the beat. Once I showed JB the track, it was on! He came into the studio with a bunch of lyrics, and we both took turns laying down vocal parts. JB was also a big help in structuring the verses and chorus to build the final song.
Jackson: Lyrically, I think it all stemmed from escaping lockdown but going back to living in a town I thought I’d left for good. It started to feel like I was living a sort of Groundhog Day life. I couldn’t work at the time either, so it felt like basically, all I was doing was waking up hungover, waiting until 5:30 when my friends would knock off work, and we’d go drinking again because I genuinely felt like there was nothing else.
JB and I are probably the weirdest members of each of our bands, so when you leave us together to write a song from scratch, you’re asking for trouble …
[ Ben Heidrich ]
So awesome that you both worked on the music video too! We love the darker vibes it brings through; tell us about the experience of putting it together and some memorable moments.
Ben: We’re both filmmakers with our own production companies, so when it came to the video, we just had fun with it. There was no budget involved, and we wanted to do something very low key. We smashed it out in a few hours in an unoccupied soon-to-be-renovated office building. It was super chill. We set up lighting in a few different scenes and took turns filming each other perform our parts.
Jackson: Yeah, about nine months after writing the track, I was back in Wagga again, so we seized the moment and shot the video in an empty office building. I think a memorable moment for me would be Ben rocking out in this hallway—and if you don’t know Ben, he’s a 6ft 2 skinny dude with long arms. I’m filming and hear a BANG and see that in his lanky flailing arm swing, he has punched the exit sign clean off the roof. His shocked face was very memorable!
How would you describe the Oddbo¥ sound to your nans?
Ben: You’re probably not gonna love this, Nan, but art comes in many forms … and it has a good beat.
Jackson: My nana is deaf and also the sweetest person alive, so I’d play it to her, and she’d say: “oh, I love it”, but her face would probably say otherwise.
What’s next?
Ben: We don’t want to sit on the fence with our music. You’ll either love it or hate it, and that’s fine. We have some exciting tracks coming out soon, some that are a very different direction from our first release. This is just the beginning.
Jackson: We’ll have a new single to share—hopefully very, very soon!
