A prolifically creative musician, Jamie Hutchings has built a career in the Australian scene that stretches back to the early 1990s.

He first established himself as the cornerstone of noisy indie-rock auteurs Bluebottle Kiss before embarking on a solo career with the release of The Golden Coach in 2002. If that wasn't enough to satiate his musical curiosities, Hutchings also formed the band Infinity Broke, releasing the first of their three albums in 2014 and using the framework of the group to venture even further into angular guitar art rock, with a strong through-line of inventive and repetitive rhythms and percussion.

Earlier this year Hutchings released his most experimental solo album, Making Water, a collage of rhythm and noise, drone and abstraction that explored free jazz, Krautrock and the kinds of terrain explored by The Necks and late period Talk Talk.

As Hutchings tends to do, he has pivoted again stylistically, returning to a more traditional sounding solo album with A New and its first single 'Roustabout'.

The song is very much about transition — from being a ghost-like wanderer to being a more connected and present mortal. It's wistful, exotic mood and ornate instrumentation conveys the dynamic of the tale beautifully, as Hutchings sings 'And if I shovel dirt on what’s been troubling you / And you slap me down / Turn my smile upside down / Then that’s what you have to do.'

"This was one of the first songs I wrote for this album, which is going back some time. I remember I hadn’t sat down and written a song in the traditional way, that is - on my own with an acoustic guitar…for ages," Hutchings recalls.

The studio process, with engineer Tim Kevin, allowed for some key moments that became integral to the success of the song's recording. "We slowed the backing vocal down in a bid to channel Elvis, and the percussion is a nod to Phil Spector, Dusty Springfield and the like. I think Tim Kevin’s piano is particularly special on this song, we were thinking of ABBA when he tracked those octave parts."

Chris Familton