Formed as a passion project for crafting pop hooks and collaborative songwriting, PEPTALK, the indie-pop Australian trio band, brings infectious fun energy & a fierce desire to tell your girl crush you like them. Made up of Phoebe Sinclair, Lara Frew, and Jay-Lee Kwan, PEPTALK's music recklessly embraces the complexities of teenage experiences, exploring themes of yearning, pining, and navigating through intricate queer relationships and heartaches. Their debut EP Dumb Teen Heartache makes us all fall back into our coming-of age phase. PEPTALK are in it for the long haul and so are we.
Miriam Boulos: Pleasure to meet all three of you! Where are you all right now?
Phoebe Sinclair: We’re in Sydney, Australia. We’re so far away in time zones.
MB: But you are definitely not far away musically because I so relate to your new EP. This one is all about yearning and pining, complex relations and heartaches. Who is this EP for?
PS: It’s all about our combined teen experiences so I’d say anyone who’s had anything similar.
Lara Frew: It’s for the girlies!
MB: Did you have in mind who you were targeting while working on that album or was it an album for yourselves first and foremost?
PS: I think it was pretty accidental that it became about that. We all write a lot of songs together and I think it became clear when we realized that there were a lot of songs that were about that topic when we were like “Okay this is something we wanna dive into and share as a body of work.” It was pretty organic I’d say.
MB: What were your intentions and creative vision as the EP took form? Were there initial concepts or ideas that didn't quite materialize in the final product?
PS: Oh, yeah quite a couple of songs that didn’t end up making the cut.
LF: I feel like it was Dumb Teen Heartache first that we wrote. We liked the idea of that as a title: Dumb Teen Heartache. I think we were also just talking about how when you’re younger every emotion is so intense cause it’s new! *laughs*. We were just like simping over the most basic… Looking back on when you’re younger you start questioning everything like “Why did I even like you?”. The tiniest bit of attention and you are caught up! So we thought this could be a pretty cool theme to run with.
MB: I’m 24 but I still go through all the simping and yearning sometimes for some reason…
PS: We are not pretending that we’ve aged out!
MB: This is what I like about the album, it’s that it validates those feelings! Anyway, can you tell us a story that inspired any of the tracks on that EP?
LF: “Close Friend” is about my story coming out. I feel like that was the first time I ever openly talked about my crushes growing up. For context, I was adopted by missionaries during a mission trip so coming out was very tricky for me. So “Close Friend” is a song I wrote about a childhood crush on a girl from church. I feel like I’ve always known I liked girls. Church helped! *Laughs*
PS: Yeah you came to us with a pretty solid idea already which was really exciting!
LF: Yes, the song talks about how we’re still friends and then I’m like “I’d kill to be closer than a close friend’ which was the idea I came with to you and you guys helped it flesh out …
MB: Going into the nitty gritty bits of songwriting, do you all collaborate? Or how does it all flow together ? Is the songwriting collaborative?
LF: Yeah very collaborative. I feel like that’s how we started as a band.
Jay-Lee Kwan: We started writing first and we found that we were the best collaborators with each other. We had all these songs, and we were like “Oh why don’t we just release them?”
I feel like we work really well, everyone’s great at something else, we have unique strengths, everyone is good at something in particular. So it works really well.
PS: Every song can be a little different too. We’re all self-produced as well so It’s been really exciting to see how some of the tracks are like, me and Lara might run into a wall and Jay will be like “Oh this is obviously what we do with it,” and vice versa in moments too. It’s really exciting how both the songwriting and the production sides seem to merge, and as Jay said we all have strengths which is really cool.
MB: Are you thinking as fully growing as PEPTALK or is it a project that is not fully thought to be a long haul one?
PS: We all write and produce for other people’s projects. But as far as projects go…PEPTALK Is the only one where we’re all in. It’s our baby definitely!
LF: We’re in it for the long haul, thank you for that!
JK: It’s us again, releasing our own songs that we love so it became our passion project. And We’ve seen a lot of backing with it too from the get-go!
LF: We started it to have fun, most of all we are just having fun and people are recognizing it which is great.
MB: How did you come up with the name PEPTALK?
LF: That was Phoebe. We were all hanging out trying to brainstorm. Phoebe and Jay had a cute picnic and then I pitched the idea like “ We should start a band!” Then, we were just thinking of a name, and we wanted something positive, energetic and fun. We wanted something like “fangirl” or something but there’s an Aussie band called Fangirl so I was like “UGH”.
It’s because we’re always giving each other pep talks. This is not new, we’ve been friends for years. Then Phoebs was just like “PEPTALK” and I was like “AH yeah that feels good.”
MB: Yeah it sounds very poppy also sonically. Are there musical influences or favorites that have significantly shaped the collective taste of PEPTALK?
LF: I feel like Remi Wolf as an artist. Songwriters, Julia Michaels is a metaphor for all of us. MUNA is a big one for us too.
MB: Do you find that your gender identities influence your music and the way you navigate the music industry? Have you been boxed into that “all women non-binary” artist/band.?
PS: I think it definitely impacts the way we navigate the industry, I hope in a positive way.
A large part of why we became producers and why we all enjoy learning and collaborating with other artists as well as doing our projects is because we are sick of being outnumbered in rooms we’d enter. I love that as the band we can be a force for a positive community. Often that could be competition kind of feelings and we all realized early on that this is not how it should be. Anyone else who is doing this, gets where we are coming from. So surely, we are supporting each other and going with that attitude has been so good because it means the community and navigating in that regard has been so good. Being women, being queer, being POC, having intersectional identities just makes you more aware when you are collaborating with other people.
LF: At the start it was never a statement, it was just all hanging out. And it was like “Oh sick!”, we are accidentally ticking lots of boxes that we are very proud of.
MB: What’s next for you as a band?
PS: We are excited to trying to work on a collaborative record.
LF: Yeah this project has given us the opportunity to meet so many people and different types of people, I think we just wanna play with some genres and stuff. We made so many friends!
PS: This year we were really lucky we got to play around Australia much further than any of us ever expected we would. So I’m just very hopeful that we get to leave Australia for some shows next year we’ll see what happens but that’s definitely the goal!
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