Interview with Quivers at The Lexington, London December 2024

Quivers are a Melbourne-based four piece consisting of Sam Nicholson (guitars), Bella Quinlan (bass), Michael Panton (guitars) and Holly Thomas (drums).

Since their first album in 2018, the band have gained a reputation for their ability to play a combination of uplifting and emotionally thought-provoking songs, driven by jangly guitars and collective vocal hooks.
Listen to Quivers and you’ll likely find yourself experiencing a multitude of raw emotions at once. KEXP’s John Richards put it best when speaking to the band on The Morning Show, “If I’m at like a five and I listen to any of your songs I’m at like an eight or a nine. Possibly a ten.”

2024 was perhaps Quivers’ busiest year to date. As well as releasing Oyster Cuts, their third album, (fourth if you count their cover album of R.E.M’s Out Of Time) the band also embarked on an extensive US tour, playing over 70 shows. When I caught up with Sam, and later Holly, at The Lexington in London in December, they were in the thick of their first European tour and the band were in high spirits. During soundcheck, it was a privilege to watch them on stage and as they worked together with the sound desk.

As I watched them tweak and play with tones to suit the space, I got a small sense of what it might have been like in the studio as the band were figuring out Oyster Cuts. Everyone was laid-back, supportive of one another and I felt their powerful collective friendship emanating from the stage.

After finding a spot backstage, I was able to ask Sam about how the band go about translating songs on an album to a live show. “I think we’re a band who will record and then the songs keep changing over time. You have a recorded version and then on tour we want them to keep changing, so it all just like kind of morphs. Like, we’re not very good at keeping songs in their thing. So, it’s been really cool to get on the road and play these songs. It’s our first time doing so many shows around an album- doing seventy, eighty shows- like a real band!”, he laughed. “So, it’s been really good. Especially having Bella and Holly sing so much and us getting into more and more of us singing together that has been really cool.”

Quivers are a band who have always sung together, even in their early days, on tracks such as ‘We’ll Go Riding On The Hearses’. However, Oyster Cuts has both Bella and Holly take lead vocals at various points throughout the record. “I think it was kind of organic and intentional”, said Sam. “It’s something we’ve wanted to explore and there’s so much to explore there. I love bands that have lots of singers…And I love it when you don’t know who is going to sing next in a band. So that’s been really cool and their voices are awesome and I feel like a total failure next to them!” he laughed

Holly later added, “I think it’s been a slow sort of thing that’s happened which has been really fun and awesome- and Bella’s an incredible singer. And when we did the REM album, I’m not sure if Sam mentioned this, but it felt like that was such a ‘Let’s do this thing!’ And then suddenly we realised more of the potential of our voices that we could explore. I feel like there’s lots more exploring to do as well. Bella and I do a fair bit of unison stuff together which is fun and challenging. It’s been really
challenging to pull it off live too.”

“When you’re playing different places, and sound’s a bit crap, sometimes it’s hard! I think being bass and drums and lead singing…It’s hard work! I think it’s a nice progression for us and it works really well for us on tour when someone’s voice is feeling a little bit hacked up, or whatever, we can choose which songs we do to be a little bit more careful of each other’s needs and stuff. It’s a lot of fun!”

The name, Oyster Cuts, may conjure images of warmth particularly with the album’s artwork, with its pink pastel colour with rich blue coral-like snippets over the top, but the name also has a sharpness to it. Speaking of the name, Sam said “Early on in the band, the first songs were about processing grief and the loss of my brother who passed and then, in a way, other loss in the band- I can’t really speak for other people. But now for this album it was kind of like zooming out on that… Water’s always been a thing that’s popped up in our songs but I kind of wanted something that was kind of in the ocean, like an oyster, but I also wanted to make a summer record which is funny because a bunch of the songs are slow-core.” “It’s kind of like the idea of imagining swimming with your friends but then you kind of get out and cut yourself on the oysters and there’s blood in the water and the sharks come after you. It’s kind of just an image and an idea and it’s only when we get asked that I kind of make this up. I’m totally making this up for you! It means different things to us as well on a different day.”

It was interesting listening to Sam talk about grief and the impact it has had on Quivers’ music. But what struck me more was how the topic of grief morphed into a conversation about love. “I think there’s an image of a bouncing ball in a room and the room gets bigger and the ball keeps bouncing but I would say with this album it’s definitely kind of hard for optimism.”
“It’s more about love, this is so lame, when you say it like that. I think we’re all pretty much in love, I can’t speak for the other people in the band…But a lot of the songs kind of end up being about love. I got married to my partner about a year ago and [Quivers] were the wedding band, which was sick! And Bella was singing Fleetwood Mac and it was the best. And we had different friends getting up, without me, singing different songs. I sang Crush [by Jennifer Paige] for my wife. And my wife, she plays in punk bands, so she sang I Think We’re Alone Now [by Tiffany] and it was so good. Music is the thing that we’re obsessed with.”

Quivers gained a global audience after their track ‘You’re Not Always On My Mind’ featured on KEXP’s Song of the Day in 2019. Since then, the band have played The Morning Show in Seattle twice, most recently in July 2024, where they were able to play some tracks from both Oyster Cuts and previous album, Golden Doubt.

“It was awesome,” said Sam. “They’ve been so supportive of us. And you get to choose the colour lights, so we got to choose a new colour. But I don’t think the thing that people realise is that because we go on The Morning Show we’re like doing it at like 7am and so we’re up at like 5am. It’s really, really, fun but it’s also a bit of a challenge singing in the morning… It’s such a cool thing they do though. To be part of those radio stations that are so supportive of the small guys as well as the big guys they’re really, really, awesome.”

Holly said, “I love the people there so much and they’re so lovely. I felt rough, personally, having a really late night and then playing in the morning and I’d barely slept! I was too scared to listen back to it. But it was an awesome experience. I love KEXP. We all do.”

Quivers are a DIY band at heart, but I couldn’t resist asking Holly what the band would do with an unlimited budget to understand how their set-up might change. “I don’t know! Our roots are so deeply DIY that I feel like I don’t know what we’d have. We’d be so stoked to have really good quality sound. We’re such basic bitches. Maybe some audio-visual kind of thing. But it would also be great to have the drums on some kind of spinny thing and it goes upside down. I feel like I can’t envisage how like our production values might increase.”

“We really like the core-ness of being a band and just playing different songs each night and just mixing it up and when you’re doing things on a higher level then there’s more of an expectation. But I feel like we like to be low in our expectations about everything and we’ve always tried to present ourselves exactly how we are without being too perfectionistic about stuff and just let it breathe. So maybe we wouldn’t be after something super crazy. I don’t know maybe just someone to just play some acoustic on ‘You’re Not Always On My Mind! You know an extra few tinkles on the keys, another person, I don’t know!”
“It’s all about the beautiful imperfections!”

Quivers are now heading back to Australia where they will be playing a string of shows, starting in North Fremantle on January 25th .

Review by Charlie (@charvawritesstuff)
You can also check out Charlie’s review of Quivers at the Lexington on the Charva Writes Stuff website
https://www.charvawritesstuff.com/about