Bloom On The Secrets Of The Light We Chase: “We Kind Of Did It All For Ourselves”

Bloom unpack the hidden details, inside jokes, and hometown roots behind their debut album The Light We Chase.

When Bloom stepped into the studio to record The Light We Chase, they were building something deeply personal, packed with quirks, memories, and easter eggs only they might ever notice. For vocalist Jono Hawkey and guitarist Jack Van Vliet, the process was a mix of experimentation, nostalgia, and a surprising amount of Jolly Ranchers.

While recording ‘Act II’, Jack threw out what he thought was a throwaway idea. “There’s a line in the song that says: ‘A knife in my hand for the headline / A perfect night to take the limelight.’ Because it’s the knife line and it goes into a breakdown, I was like: what if we have a samurai sword sound or something go in there?” he recalls. “We all laughed about it, and then five minutes later Sam [Bassal, producer] was like: ‘…do you want me to put it in?’ He did, and then it stayed in, it didn’t get deleted.”

It started as a joke, but it became one of the many subtle sonic touches that define Bloom’s newest album. “It blends really nicely,” Jack says, grinning. “So that’s a nice little Easter egg in that one.”

For Jono, that playful atmosphere was key to how The Light We Chase took shape. “While we were recording the album, I stumbled across a YouTube video that was Justin Bieber’s My World slowed by 1000%,” he says. “There’s a piece of software where you just chuck MP3 files in – it’s called PaulXStretch – and it stretches things out where it’ll turn a two minute song into a three hour ambient noise sort of thing. I found this YouTube video of My World and I went: this is fucking awesome.”

That random find made its way directly into the record. “We ended up actually using that software on the album. At the end of the song ‘Show Me Who I Am’, which is the last song on the album, it fully drops and stretches out. And that idea wouldn’t have existed without Justin Bieber’s My World slowed a hundred thousand percent, or whatever it was,” Jono says. “Both this and the samurai sword additions speak to the environment that we created while recording the album, or the environment that Sammy fostered where we were able to be a bit silly at times. We kind of just bounced ideas around, we played with atmos and production elements more so than we had on any release prior.”

That freedom shows in the final mix, little hidden moments that listeners might not catch, but Bloom will always know are there. “Even if other people don’t pick up on them,” Jono says, “we know what we did there.”

Jack adds, “Shout out Justin Bieber! Actually, there was also going to be a Citizen Kane quote in the middle of ‘Withered’, but we didn’t put it in.”

“Too much copyright licensing,” Jono jokes. “Maybe one day we can release ‘Jack’s edition’ with that in there?”

Not every studio secret of Bloom’s was digital, though. Some were more…sugary. “Another behind the scenes fact about the album,” Jono admits, “I don’t have a good vocal warmup routine. Actually, I do: I have my own developed system for recording and also for performing: I will just have as many Jolly Ranchers as humanly possible. It creates a lot of saliva. It keeps me wet, which is gross to say, but that’s what it does.”

That method, however, came with side effects. “There are quite a few takes that we had to redo on this album because I would have a Jolly Rancher in my mouth and you could hear the candy rattling around in my teeth,” he says. “I don’t think it’s noticeable enough where you’d actually hear it on the album. I’d have a Jolly Rancher and then every day at 4:00pm we’d walk down the road to the liquor store to buy white Monsters. Everyone who was there on the day, we’d get an energy drink of some kind. It’s funny to think about clocking off from the studio, wrapping up for the day, ‘I’m going to go down and get a white Monster’. The epitome of health!”

“I have to order Jolly Ranchers in two or three kilo bags,” he continues. “There’s a photo of me holding this big bag of Jolly Ranchers during recording that I posted on my Instagram, I won’t record without them! During recording, I’m burning through about 10–15 JRs. As a collective, we were probably burning through about 30 a day.”

On tour, the ritual doesn’t stop. “I take my Jolly Ranchers with me as well,” Jono says. “I will probably have about three or four before a set. Just a hot tip for any vocalists out there: a Jolly Rancher – there’s nothing better!”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had one before,” Jack says.

Beyond studio quirks, The Light We Chase is steeped in the band’s roots. To visually capture that, Bloom turned to Belrose, the Sydney suburb where they grew up. “We wanted to take photos of Belrose, a place with a lot of nods throughout the album,” Jono explains. “We got our photographer Jack Fontes to come out and just spent the afternoon at golden hour shooting back streets, the old power station where people used to smoke cones, and little houses that we remembered. The album artwork is taken on a street that is 50 steps from where I used to catch the bus to school when I was in year four through to year six.”

“It’s very bittersweet that I can now look back on this and be like: not only do I know where the photo was taken, but 10-year-old me… he’s right there!”

Jack adds, “He’s right there!”

Those hometown ties run deeper than just the artwork. “One of the music videos we shot for the album is also in the venue that all of us went to when we were 15,” Jack says. “A lot of us had our first shows there, and played our first shows there. It was where everyone cut their teeth.”

“YoYo’s Youth Centre!” Jono jumps in. “There hasn’t been a show there for well over a decade. I was going to shows there probably three times a month back in the day. There were local band comps there, international bands would come through as well. That’s where we kind of developed and fostered this love of heavy music.”

“It was crazy walking back into YoYo’s for the first time again because I hadn’t been in there for at least a decade,” he continues. “Nothing had changed.”

Jack nods. “Yeah, it was exactly the same.”

For Bloom, returning to those spaces and embedding them into The Light We Chase was a statement as much as it was nostalgia. “I would say there’s a lot of subtle things throughout this entire album campaign,” Jono reflects. “Whether it’s locations we shot at, the things we slipped in, and/or the production things, we kind of did it all for ourselves more than we had on any release prior. It really felt like: if we’re going to do this album and we’re going to have so many nods to these childhood places, we should actually go to these places because it is so much more authentic. And it was so cool for all of us to do.”

Bloom’s newest album The Light We Chase is available now via Pure Noise Records.