Unusual experiences and satisfying results.

Architecture in Helsinki have, ever so quietly, become something of an Antipodean success story.

Where other acts are content to build a profile locally before even thinking about stepping out overseas, the Melbourne group – formed in the kitchen of frontman Cameron Bird – stretched their wings globally from the get-go, and are garnering incredibly positive press in indie circles for third album Places Like This.

It’s an album that has a global imprint to it – nearly all of it was conceived overseas and pieced together by band members in various locales.  Bird, for instance, now calls New York home.  Sam Perry, on the hand, is in Brazil with his Brazilian girlfriend.  Co-founding member Kellie Sutherland, however, is still Melbourne-based.

“It’s great!” Kellie enthuses of the band’s global homes.  “We get together for rehearsals and it really separates downtime from rehearsals to touring – it’s been working really well.”

The writing process of Places Like This was not a natural adaptation, she says, compared to the likes of debut Fingers Crossed where the members congregated together in a kitchen, but it’s something that she believes was crucial to the sound of the album.

“It changed the writing process a huge amount,” she confirms.  “Cameron moved to New York – Brooklyn – and then as soon as he got there he started writing songs, and we started demoing them about a month later in August of last year.  We recorded the demos – but we sort of write the songs that way – via the internet with Cameron sending the song ideas over to us, and each of us individually working on whatever songs took our fancy at the time.

“We’d get together weekly and share our ideas via conference cool via iChat, and then we’d send things back and forth and send production notes and things like that, and then we got together in September and got to play the songs for the first time together and then they REALLY exploded – we tightened up the arrangement and the instrumentation, and then toured with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.  We then went straight into the recording studio so the songs were still fresh and we’d been playing them night after night as practice, and we really wanted to get that energy and capture that.”

The challenges that the writing presented removed Bird from his comfort zone, Kellie believes, and it was an inspiring time for the group.  “We wanted to approach everything with a new perspective,” she says.

Instead of hiring a producer, the band acted as their own engineer, with all six at the recording desk at any time, having their say and waiting and watching and listening to everything that was going on, resulting in the creation of Places Like This being the most intensive time of the band’s career.

“Oh, definitely, it was,” she says.  It’s not necessarily something that she wants to leap back into doing straight away: “There were things about it that I loved, and absolutely loved – I really enjoyed that we were so in practice that we were able to put down 70% of the album in 6 days, and were able to play it that well.  It doesn’t stop us being completely anal about things being exactly as how we wanted it to sound, but everybody was right there.

“But,” she says, “if I had my time again I’d ask for 2 more week.  No, 3 more weeks at the most.  But it would be a different album – it would be strewn with layers of stuff that really didn’t need to be there, and at this point it’s just how it’s meant to be.”

Architecture in Helsinki’s Places Like This is out now.