Lychees, milk, oats, pineapple and peas. If you were wondering what the recipe for a convincingly disgusting quota of prop vomit would be, then, according to Body Type vocalist and guitarist Sophie McComish, these five ingredients should do the trick. She would know. Press play on the Sydney quartet’s video for recent single ‘Sick Bag’ and you’ll find Sophie wiping the lumpy concoction from her mouth as she sings of an ill-fated relationship via a series of visceral, delightfully grotesque vignettes: spat-out fingernails and a heart like a baby bird that “shits through your fingertips”.
“That was a big day, let me tell ya!” laughs the guitarist, reminiscing back to her on-camera exploits. “We had a 5am call time and no idea what we were doing, and then our dear friend Maddie [Purdy] who was directing pulled out this jar of homemade fake vomit. It actually didn’t taste too bad…”
Calling from their Aussie hometown, Sophie and bassist/ vocalist Georgia Wilkinson-Derums have just got back from a celebration dinner on the eve of their third album ‘Tally’’s release via their new home of p(doom) – the label helmed by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. “We were reflecting on how this has been the worst Mercury retrograde in years,” informs Sophie sagely of the evening’s conversational tangents.
Astrological misalignments might be on the discussion cards, however Body Type needn’t worry about such problems. With ‘Tally’, the band sound more locked in and confident than ever. Where 2022 debut ‘Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising’ and its 2023 follow-up ‘Expired Candy’ posited the quartet – completed by vocalist/ guitarist Annabel Blackman and drummer Cecil Coleman – as a fierce garage-rock unit, ‘Tally’ finds them pushing their sonic remit into dynamic new directions. From the ‘60s girl group sensibilities of ‘And What Else?’ to the Kenickie-esque melodies of ‘Gorgeous’ to ‘Do You Want To Cry Your Eyes Out?’ and its charming hybrid of The Velvet Underground and Belle and Sebastian, on their third LP the band have allowed sweeter, softer moments to shine through.
“We played this incredible show at a venue in Sydney called Phoenix that feels like you’re in a church, and it was the first time we’d worn in-ears. We were removed from the post-punk/ rock setting that we’ve always lived in where we created this rock persona just to deal with shit: shit sound, picking up gear, putting down gear, being exhausted, not sleeping, no money. You’re invited into a masculine energy because you kind of have to do all that,” Georgia suggests. “But in this show, we could hear everything and it just became so angelic. It [made me realise] you can just be soft. You don’t have to scream.”
Unsurprisingly as a rock band made up of four women, Body Type have had a lot to scream about in the decade since they first formed. Early single ‘The Charm’ was written after a man in the industry told them that, if they didn’t get better at playing their instruments, they’d lose their own charm (“I don’t think they’ve worked with any other all-female bands since then, so that’s one telling factor,” Sophie notes). Still now, three albums, umpteen live shows and a series of enviable support slots with luminaries from Pixies to Warpaint later, the misogyny rolls in. In a since-deleted post under the video for the satirical, compliment-seeking ‘And What Else?’, one commenter labelled the track “very unattractive” – an implicit slight not on its creativity or skill, but on how palatable it made its authors appear.
“The uglier the better, is what I say,” Sophie shrugs when we ask how they respond to such comments. “There have been shockers. There was one that I think got deleted that said something like, ‘You guys are gonna grow up and become cat women’ or something stupid like that. And Annabel had this really pithy response to it, but it’s just not worth the time. It’s already so demanding to make the videos and post the content, and so much is demanded of musicians these days that responding to idiot trolls on the internet is low on the list, in my opinion.”
On ‘Tally’, Body Type frequently lean into the uncomfortable, embarrassing, awkward bits of being alive. “Life is messy and gross and that’s just reality. And you know, what else is there to sing about?!” Sophie laughs. Yet with the help of Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, who stepped in on production duties, the band have found new ways to keep their biting, whipsmart spirit but let the light in. Supporting the Los Angeles band back in 2023 was a huge moment for Body Type’s own journey – not least because of the relationship it fostered with their studio whizz drummer.
“You can still be commanding and powerful in that space. And I think that’s hard, you know? It’s hard to feel that as a woman on the stage, because you feel like you’ve got to try and prove yourself and be noisy and be strong. There’s all this big stuff, but there’s a lot to be said about finding power in softness,” says Sophie. “At the moment – socially, politically – I don’t know why we operate on the bullhorn spectrum,” considers Georgia, drawing the shape of a bell curve. “It’s all up there, and you just miss the soft belly at the centre.”
From King Gizzard to their upcoming autumn tourmate Courtney Barnett, Body Type’s network remains proudly Australian. “Both King Gizzard and Courtney are still so invested in supporting new and emerging music from Australia and I just think that’s so cool,” Sophie smiles. “I feel really honored to be recognised by both of those artists and to be part of their communities.” But ‘Tally’ was recorded, for the first time, in LA and there’s a sense of place that rings through it. During the making of the album, they’d go for drives through Laurel Canyon to “feel the Fleetwood Mac thing” and walk through Silver Lake, soaking up a new vibe that matched their musical intentions.
Sometimes, their expeditions didn’t quite go to plan. “I was trying to find Jack Black because Stella said he lives [nearby]. I didn’t see him but I did see Kim Gordon and embarrassed myself,” Georgia grimaces. “Just don’t be a dickhead, Georgia! Don’t go up and say ‘hi’ to the coolest woman in the world! I told her I’m a fan and she was just like, ‘Thaaaaanks’,” the bassist deadpans with a perfectly American vocal fry.
More successful were the two musicians’ trips to visit the retrospective exhibition of pioneering artist Louise Bourgeois. A creative who mixes the hard and soft, the terrifying and the vulnerable, her approach became a north star for how to navigate their own stories. “We’re a bunch of women, we’re all in our thirties now, none of us have children and it’s always an anxiety,” says Georgia. “It’s such a hard thing. How do you reconcile artistic pursuits where you’re not paid anything, when it feels like a passion project half the time? There are all these inextricable things that are linked and it presents as anxiety, but what she does is she sublimates it.”
On ‘Tally’ more than any other of Body Type’s releases so far, there’s the sense that romance and horror are two sides of the same coin. “I think that’s kind of inherently part of womanhood really, right? Like, I think that kind of encapsulates women’s experience on this planet in ways that men just will never comprehend and I guess that’s something that we’re trying to sing about,” suggests Sophie.
It’s an attitude that the trolls might never understand, but for the rest of us, in ‘Tally’, Body Type have made their best work yet: a triumph that proves letting a little softness in can sometimes be the ballsiest act of them all.
