Body Type Count Their Growth on Bold New Album ‘Tally’
Sydney indie rock outfit Body Talk are gearing up for the release of their new album, Tally, which drops this month via Poison City Records. Ahead of the record hitting streaming services, band members Annabel Blackman and Cecil Coleman spoke with The Note about working with Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, being influenced by art and pursuing solo projects.
Words Emily Wilson // Image Jack Saltmiras
The name of Sydney-bred rock band Body Type’s forthcoming album indicates that they are keeping score. To tally something means to count, to calculate. And with their third full-length record Tally, slated for a July 24 release, Body Type is keeping track of the numbers and playing with the symbols too.
It is a mature offering, the kind of album a band makes when they’ve figured out their strengths and honed them. The singles released so far - ‘Sickbag’, ‘Mulberry’ and ‘And What Else?’ - are rife with humour and punch. The album was recorded in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the destructive Southern Californian wildfires, once the band, made up of Annabel Blackman, Cecil Coleman, Sophie McComish and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums, reconvened after a “break” where they tended to disparate projects. Warpaint member Stella Mozgawa produced the album, and Bonnie Knight and Mark Perkins tended to the engineering duties.
Time spent apart meant that the members were able to bring “more external influences” into the studio sessions, Anabel explains over a Zoom call, in which she is joined by fellow band member Cecil. She cites an example: “Cec went and played in a country-style band, and she got really good at doing the country shuffle. She also learned how to drum and do insane harmonies in this other band, and now she’s brought that to this band.
“Anabel released her own solo album as well,” Cecil chimes in, referring to Anabel’s 2025 release Interior Delirum, under the artist name Solo Career. “The crazy thing is, we had been told in the past that all of our energies needed to be in this project wholly. And I think all four of us could not have disagreed with that statement more.”
They both agree that playing in other projects and “pursuing creative identities outside of the band” has helped add layers of experience to this new record.
Cecil reveals that, after recently combing through her music files, she realised that some of the demos which would later become Tally first started being recorded at the beginning of 2024. “So even though we technically had a break, we were still very much together.”
“I don’t really remember a break,” Anabel admits, laughing.
“Yeah, I literally don’t remember a real break. It was probably a touring break.”
“But the cool thing about going away and doing these other projects is you come back appreciating what is great and fun to do in the band context or with each other.”
Cecil describes the band’s first two records - Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising and Expired Candy - as “more jagged and pointy,” which she explains was likely as a result of the fact that they were recorded within a very set period of time. “But this one was different, I guess because it was a destination record, in the sense that we were going somewhere else.”
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Working with Mozgawa opened up new textures and tones. “Sometimes Stella would suggest a different sound to what we were previously used to, and that was across the whole sonic spectrum, I would say, from drums to guitar. Things definitely feel a bit softer,” Cecil says. “The sound of LA, the colours of LA, the wholefood nature of LA, inspired the songs on this record.” Hence a BPM that lags throughout the album.
The weird Lynchian quality of LA is definitely also present on Tally, specifically on the surreal track ‘Eyes Is A Mouth Is A Face.’ “There’s definitely some wack shit going on there, in a good way.”
“We wrote it on the spot, which is not our usual practice,” Anabel says of the song. “I think if we had a lot more time we would do that more.”
“Every single song throughout our now catalogue - haha! - is unique in the way that it has come out,” Cecil adds. “I would say it’s a full spectrum.”
The song was lyrically inspired by the art of Louise Bourgeois, whose abstract expressionism is present throughout the record. Sophie McComish and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums were particularly inspired by her exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Has The Day Invaded The Or Has The Night Invaded The Day?
“We’re always talking about babies and being women and how it fits into playing in a band, and if there is ever going to be a good time,” Anabel explains. “And the exhibition seems to speak a lot to her challenges of being a mother and maybe not being maternal, or not feeling like a good mother - the tension between that. It’s pretty abstract, but that’s kind of one of the forefront concerns for us as women in a band.”
It is possible that this artistic inspiration contributes to the album’s more layered sound - as well as a more thoughtful production process.
“I think the previous albums, we just wanted to sound like how we sound live,” Anabel says. “We didn’t want too much reverb, we didn’t want to be drenched in that girl-pop sound that someone else is projecting onto us.” That, combined with their budgets and time constraints, thus led to their earlier albums sounding pretty raw. “Obviously, the benefit of having a producer, someone who is so involved in the process, is that there is a whole lot of atmosphere that is created on a lot of songs. I think it’s been really cool because we just haven’t experienced this range of sounds before in our other records.”
“I agree,” Cec says. “At the end of 2023, a lot changed for us, and I think maybe this record, it feels to me a bit more like…” She hesitates, looking for the right term. “I don’t want to say the word ‘reclaiming’, but I guess we got to do it on our own terms.” They spent the early portion of their career besieged by tough deadlines. But with Tally, she says, “We really got to spend the time writing it and deciding what we wanted to do, to no one else’s timeline but our own…That’s also why this record sounds different to me: the constraints weren’t there.”
Tally, then - for perhaps the first time - epitomises a number, and a sound, that works for Body Type.
Tally by Body Talk is out on Friday 24 July via Poison City Records. Pre-order here.
