SPOUSE
Words / Interview: Joseph Maranta
Live photos: Marc Roberts @moby__lick | Press photos: Jesse Pretorius @moralrefuse
Authenticity is somewhat of an overused term in music journalism. It's easily thrown into a pile of adjectives to aggregate an author’s admiration of a particular act, though it's often glossed over and forgotten about as readers digest the other ensuing adjectives aiming to surmise a band’s ethos.
I’m no less guilty of this than any other writer, but when trying to brainstorm an introduction to Canberra quintet Spouse, the word authenticity kept coming back to me as the foremost descriptor of their essence.
I’ve been following the band since the release of their second single, The Birds Are Dead Along The Highway. From the first listen I was immediately made a fan of their music, but my adoration for their lack of pretension and authenticity was more latent. Parasocially I stalked their entire Instagram, and became more infatuated in their philosophy of D.I.Y., community-prioritisation and vulnerability.
From their social media I then stumbled across their blog, spouse.net.au, where the respective band members divulge fearlessly their inner thoughts on music and their own philosophies to fans, in a truly authentic and quite poetic manner.
Uniquely because of this blog, I was then able to meet them for an interview before their debut Meanjin show, where I was again met with their authenticity, this time in person. Welcoming me into their tour van in front of The Brightside, the five of them were equally pleasant and accommodating in both the interview and the miscellaneous conversations after the fact.
From the van to the stage came their performance, which was a final affirmation to me of their authenticity, this time as performers. Engrossing the stage in front of a crowd which was likely ignorant to their music, Spouse were visceral live. Delivering a jagged, and at times jarring, display of emo / shoegaze, they left every emotion on stage in a markedly cathartic set.
Here’s our pre-gig interview with Em Nonogaki Hunter (Vox, Guitar), Daan Stephens (Drums), Emmett Gaunt (Bass), Josh Garrard (Synth, Vox) and Ezra Ryan (Lead Guitar) of Spouse, ahead of their upcoming single Wishing on Numbers, releasing tomorrow.
JOE: Thanks for welcoming me into the Tour van Spouse! How have you enjoyed supporting Glare on their Australian tour?
EMILY: It’s been amazing honestly.
Everyone in Glare has been so friendly, which is good because I think we were all a bit nervous before the tour since they’re a big American band. You hear stories of big bands not interacting at all with their supports, but they’ve all been super happy to hang out and they’ve been so generous with their time.
EZRA: Yeah we got to show them the Opera House in Sydney. We also took them around Newtown and introduced them to Double Happiness, which they did not like.
JOE: It’s your first time performing in Meanjin, which is very exciting. Are there any bands from here that you’ve had your eye on, or who you wish you could see perform live?
EMILY: I really love Lace Angel, and I wish I could’ve seen them play here.
Blind Girls also, I’m a big fan of them. I’ve been following Naaki Soul for ages, so I’m super keen to play with them tonight.
There’s heaps of good emo coming out of Brisbane, so it’s a shame we’re not here for longer.
DAAN: Yeah I’m excited to see Naaki Soul as well. I love Local Authority too. Keep on Dancin’s I also really like.
There are a lot of great bands here, I’m just blanking on the rest of them.
JOE: You all rep Canberra very proudly, and the city itself has produced so many great bands that have gone on to do great things across the country, so what is it about the city’s scene that makes it such a hotbed for good music?
JOSH: I think the general answer comes down to the lack of arts and music infrastructure.
It means that the people who are creating art and music do it because they really want to do it, because if you don’t want to create art and music enough, you can’t create it since there’s such a lack of resources in Canberra.
EMMETT: The size of the city has its limitations.
In a bigger city, it can have more specific spaces for niches, whereas we have so many niches that come together into one big community because of Canberra’s size and its arts infrastructure. If you go to any show in Canberra you’ll have DJs, you’ll have art students, you’ll have alt-band kids, indie and folk artists - they all come under one roof and create an amalgamation of art and influence. I think that’s a big part of Canberra’s charm.
EZRA: You can definitely talk about the lack of venues or the low population of Canberra, but for me what makes the scene special is its geography. It’s relatively in between Sydney and Melbourne, and I think a lot of the friends we’ve made and the influences we’ve received have come from other cities. People do east coast tours and they need places to crash or they need to stop halfway between cities, and we’ll often try to talk people into playing a show in Canberra and to crash on one of our couches.
While we are a little isolated here, it is relatively easy to travel to and from. There’s a really long history of music from this city, and there are some absolute titans in the current scene who are carrying magnitudes beyond their own weight when it comes to supporting the survival of venues and bands here. They’re the heart of the scene to me.
JOE: Speaking about the heart of Canberra’s live music scene, can each of you discuss the importance of Gutwrench Records to Canberra?
Emily: Gutwrench is so unifying, it’s very accessible and open to many different audiences. All of the D.I.Y. shows they’ve put on in Canberra have been all-ages, and I think that all-age shows are something that is very overlooked within Canberran venues. Obviously venues are struggling so much already, and the infrastructure in Canberra makes running a live-music venue more difficult than it already is.
So events that Gutwrench Records do put on, where they’re open to everyone and all are welcome to come, it makes it all the more special.
JOE: And specifically for Daan, as the founder of Gutwrench Records, what’s the relationship like between your band Spouse, and your label Gutwrench Records?
DAAN: Gutwrench has always been working with Spouse, and vice versa. We all do Gutwrench to varying degrees here.
I started Gutwrench when Spouse had already formed, so we’ve always been very entwined. I’ve always been sounding Gutwrench ideas off Spouse internally. As far as it goes releasing music under Gutwrench, it’s been very fun. Our last single, The Birds Are Dead Along The Highway, was Spouse’s first release under Gutwrench Records.
It hasn’t been a typical Gutwrench Records release though, as the band as a unit has done everything internally. But the two projects, Gutwrench Records and Spouse, they’ve always gone hand-in-hand.
JOE: I noticed you wiped your Spotify prior to 2025, what led to that decision?
EMILY: Yeah we’d put out a demo EP from when we’d first started in our first year of writing together, prior to Emmett joining the band.
The material didn’t resonate with us anymore, and we were in a weird space regarding where we wanted to be, in terms of DSPs. So we thought we’d clean the slate and begin again.
DAAN: The EP is still on Bandcamp, for those who want to listen to it.
Regardless of how we feel about it, I think it’s still important that the EP is somewhere, for archival purposes. Personally, I love that Bandcamp is that sort of platform. I really like it when you check out a band on Bandcamp and you find a bunch of other music that isn’t on streaming platforms.
JOE: You put out your latest single, The Birds Are Dead Along The Highway, back in August. How have you enjoyed the reception towards that track?
EMILY: We were pretty shocked with how well people responded to it.
We were worried initially about putting out our longest song as a single. It’s one of our longest-worked songs, and we’re really proud of it. We wanted to be staunch, and to say ‘hey, if you can be bothered, then you’ll have to be bothered enough to listen for seven-and-a-half minutes’. We wanted to put our freakiest foot forward first.
JOE: There’s a three-minute-long bridge on this track between the opening and the climax. Was that bridge always built into the song, or was it something developed later in its recording?
EZRA: That was always the intent behind the song.
Structurally, we were partly inspired by Bull Believer by Wednesday. We love that the song holds your attention for so long, and that it goes in so many different directions. We really like songs that establish a pattern that eventually deteriorates.
DAAN: The bare bones of that track we wrote in one afternoon.
But yeah the reception has been amazing, we’ve been very lucky that people have enjoyed our live shows, so it’s good that they can enjoy recorded material from us too. This song is very representative of our catalogue, and if you like it, you’ll probably like the rest of what we have coming.
JOSH: To us, it’s the most Spouse song.
JOE: Despite the song’s name, a lot of the accompanying video and live-set design have references to horses. Is this a solely aesthetic choice, or is there a deeper meaning behind it?
EMILY: We’re big fans of what we like to call ‘creepy country’. A sort of Australian gothic.
JOSH: That regional aesthetic is something that’s really resonated with us, there’s a melancholy to it which we think is cohesive with the music. When we shot that music video, we drove out into the country and explored and shot whatever was interesting to us. So the horses specifically, we just happened to cross paddocks and they came up to say hi to us, and the footage was very beautiful.
EZRA: As far as a piece of imagery, and the meaning it has, I think it's less about horses and more about animals more generally. We’ve written a song called Pinfold, and the word itself refers to an area on a farm that houses stray animals that may have wandered off nearby farms.
We write a lot about overextension of emotions and abandonment, so I think the imagery of lost or stray animals in addition to urban decay, often comes up a lot as a result. So I think we’re drawn towards the imagery of animals and infrastructure, and horses are a part of that.
JOE: You have a new song releasing shortly called ‘Wishing on Numbers’, so what can you reveal about the new single?
EMILY: It’s not quite as long, only about five minutes or so in length, but we’re definitely keeping that ‘vacuum’ composition, where everything is happening and it’s all coming in, before taking it away and bringing it back again. A lot of fake-outs I suppose.
It relates to the emotional theme of the song, which is pinning a lot of effort and emotion on something that never truly comes.
EZRA: A lot of our upcoming music is for pent-up people. We think a lot about tension and release, and Wishing on Numbers is another song in that vein. It’s another track that has contributions from Thea Martin on violin, which is a new sonic texture that informs the song. These two songs we really love, and they’re almost always the opener and closer to our live set because they do feel like an introduction and conclusion for us.
JOE: Finally, you’ve been playing together since 2021 and would’ve made a lot of fun memories along the way. But reflecting on the past five years, what’s been your proudest or fondest experience of being in Spouse?
DAAN: What I think about the most is how well we’ve learned to work together, and how much we’ve grown with our interpersonal relationships. It’s a constant thing we’re working on, but we’ve learnt a lot about how to show up for one another.
The better the morale is, the better the music is. So it’s something I’m very proud of, we’ve invested so much time in learning what works for one another.
EMILY: Being able to record an upcoming album together in Adelaide, that was one of my favourite moments. Spending a week-and-a-half in a city we’d never been together in before, we were so lucky to be welcomed in by the Adelaide community and Matt Schulz. We spent a whole year gearing up for that recording. Practising the songs, setting tempo tracks for each individual bar of each song and making sure we were bulletproof happy with each part, I’m so proud of us for having done it.
EZRA: I have two.
My first one was an event. Being able to support Fiddlehead was massive, because they were always such an inspiring presence for us. I remember being in the crowd with everyone after we played, and thinking how insane it was to have done that by doing what we wanted to do this whole time. We didn’t have to change ourselves into something or someone we didn’t want to be in order to have done that. I remember looking at Daan in the crowd and saying: ‘no one made us do this’. And that was a really freeing thought.
The second one happened a month ago after the single came out. I was talking to someone outside of our show and they were saying that coming to our shows, and shows in the Canberra scene had made them want to start a band. He was telling me about his drumming and the band he was starting, and I full on almost burst into tears in front of this kid. I know how much the Canberra scene and live music helped me as a lonely sixteen-year-old, and that is such a beautiful thing to have in your life.
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