Written across three years and three continents – from the wild sprawl of New York to the industrial cityscape of Berlin, and the quiet pull of their home in Auckland – Portal, the debut record of New Zealand sibling duo, Balu Brigada (Henry and Pierre Beasley), is a captivating journey in sound and story. Distilling the duo’s emotions and experiences, Portal stitches together fleeting memories – from situationships to sunset drives, apocalyptic bops to adrenaline rushes – into a dreamlike collage of alt-pop riffs and synth hooks. It’s a coming-of-age record, but not the kind that wraps things up in a bow – this one spirals, flickers, doubles back on itself. It’s complicated; aren’t we all. Timing with the release, the band take us through the record, track-by-track, walking us through the world behind Portal – the places, people, and experiences that shaped each song.

The Portal:
“The Portal is the gateway into the world. Funnily enough, until the week of delivering the album, we had an entirely different intro, which involved a lot of cellos and had a kind of menacing Eleanor Rigby-type vibe. In one of the final mixing sessions we had, Pierre felt an urge to create something entirely new. This was a terrifying prospect at first, since our deadline was literally in two days, but his instinct served us well because it ultimately does that via the track’s atmospheric synths and euphoric soundscapes. By the end of it, Dann Hume (who mixed the whole project) mentioned that he could imagine us walking on to this track far more easily than the previous version – so we’re all happy we made the game time decision for this to be ‘The Portal’ into the album.”

So Cold:
“So Cold started as, “Let’s try to make something with a riff you could chant as a football match,” and went from there. We were living in Harlem at the time, and every morning we’d wake up and watch music videos by 2000s bands like Franz Ferdinand and The White Stripes, so that influenced a lot of the gritty tones, drum and bass groove and even the visuals. Not everyone we showed the demo to ‘got it’ per se, but we both knew that we had something special as soon as we recorded the bassline.”

Golden Gate Girl:
“Golden Gate Girl was another one that we felt super strongly about from its inception, and we’re so glad to have it out there. In this session, there was one point that I (Henry) left the room for twenty mins for whatever reason, and I came back to Pierre having produced a solid version of the entire song. Then he left the room for twenty mins and I felt the need to respond by writing out all the lyrics while he was gone. It was one of the easiest writing days that we’ve ever had together, and we like to think of it as a beautiful Frankenstein of some of our favourite influences: Yeah Yeah Yeahs-type guitar line + Lou Reed-type delivery + Charli XCX-type lyric writing = Golden Gate Girl.”

Sideways:
“Sideways was written on a day off in between the New Jersey show and the New York show on tour. As it often seems to happen with us, a lot of the sounds we put in there were kind of semi-ironic to begin with. The session started with Pierre making a drum pattern and then adding a percussion that sounded like a duck’s quack. Silly stuff. We eventually got enough structure, melody, and unique sounds in the song to leave it for the day. Then when we listened back to the demo during a run in the park, we both looked at each other at one point as if to say: “We got something with this one.”

Birthday Interlude:
“Birthday Interlude is a one-take moment we had on a writing trip in rural New Zealand. In the last year we’d purchased two synthesisers (a MicroKorg and a Juno-X) and we were both excited about experimenting on them, so we just found some sounds and hit record for a while until we locked in together. In the next couple of weeks, Pierre had the idea to layer a voice note of a friend on top of the take, and it felt like the right emotion for the chords and sonic. Unlike a lot of our songs, it was delightfully underthought, and that’s our favourite part about it.”

Backseat:
“Backseat was written in a little office that had been converted into our studio for about a month in Manhattan, New York. We wanted to write something that matched the energy and intensity of So Cold, and ended up with what we sometimes refer to as “So Cold’s nasty older brother.” By the end of the session, the only lyrics we had were “From the Backseat” so in the following month, we decided that the lyric would refer to someone trying to be a backseat driver in our lives and careers. That felt like an appropriate explanation for the energy and tension within the song – we followed that thread and filled out the rest of the 6.5 minute saga.”

Politix:
“Politix claims the title of ‘MOST LYRICS WRITTEN’ on the album, because I found the lyric sheet for the session and it stretches something like eleven pages. The song has a pretty wide range of emotion, so it was tough to find the right blend of sass and sensitivity. It will always hold a special place on the album because it holds some of the most intimate moments (in the first chorus), as well as some of the most aggressive moments (in the guitarline outro) and marries them in a way that feels kind of liberating.”

The Question:
“The Question is probably the most mellow and romantic feeling on the album. We wanted to make something that felt like a starry-eyed love story with an edge of realism that would serve to acknowledge the weirdness of modern-day situationships.”

4.25:
“4.25 we wrote in Kaiwaka, a rural town in the North Island of New Zealand. Being in this space seemed to make all our writing a little more introspective and heady, in a way that the album needed. We went through a few different versions of how to blend a really intimate verse with a pretty bombastic chorus, but always liked the balance that it struck because it felt like an honest depiction of two different head states at the end of a break-up – sometimes quiet and sombre, and sometimes messy and explosively frustrating.”

Isolation:
“Isolation was an interesting song to write. In some ways, it feels like a deeper, darker continuation of the 4.25 narrative, but pumped up to a psychotic level. We had pretty much the whole song recorded instrumentally, and then it was late in the game that we wrote the lyrical narrative. The instrumental and melody we had was so winding, floaty and somewhat out-of-body, so the lyrics felt like they needed to be a bit off-kilter and obsessive, like a stalker thinking he’s being romantic. After the lyrics were written, we just got to make silly sounds on top of it – one of which was Pierre recording me dropping a ring on a wooden chair using a $20,000 mic chain.”

What Do We Ever Really Know:
“What Do We Ever Really Know is our apocalyptic bop. Although the chorus kinda makes it feel like a love song, the emphasis is actually on the idea that no one knows what the hell we’re doing, and all we can do is try to enjoy the ride without obsessing over the outcome. The song started out with a really sunny guitar riff, and then Pierre started chugging this really aggressive low bass under it, which is what made it feel kind of dark and heavy, and influenced the idea that it was supposed to be a lot more existential than a dancey lil love song.”

Butterfly Boy:
“Butterfly Boy is a song we quickly knew would be an appropriate end to the album. It’s a lot more synth-heavy and atmospheric and a lot more introspective than the songs we wrote in New York, so it feels audibly obvious to us that it was written in New Zealand. It’s us as our most raw and vulnerable, and honestly, just a song about how we’re both sensitive dudes. The song was originally titled ‘Deal’ in a reference to how it feels like it’s ‘part of the deal’ to be sensitive as an artist, as it gives you the emotional capacity to create things. But thankfully, we wrote a line about how fragile butterflies are, and that meant that we had a way better song title to give it.

Balu Brigada’s record, Portal, is out now.