Listening to The Presets is like watching Donnie Darko for the first time, it’s such a superb trip but during second listen you pick up on a deeper darker feeling as you realise there’s so much more going on than you first picked up on -the more you listen, the more mind-blowing it becomes, suddenly you’re hooked and you’re not quite sure if it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard or the darkest journey into the very depths of your soul, all you know is that it just keeps getting better and better with every listen.

It’s hard to believe that Prop’s Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes began this project whilst mucking around during breaks and at the end of rehearsals. Listening to the music they’re making, you would find it easier to believe that they’ve been dabbling in this sort of stuff for years, rather than a muck around side project.

‘Kim and I have been playing in Prop together for 7 years now and we’d always be writing this really beautiful soul music that meant a lot to us in Prop, but usually when the rehearsal finished when the others would go home, Kim would go and get on the drums and I would go and grab the synthesizer and we’d rock out and have a bit of a jam, just having fun, cause it just came so naturally and so easy to us, it just seemed like the right thing to do. So, we’d always be doing this before and after rehearsals, then one day we just thought, ‘Shit, we should actually do this, we have so much fun doing it, so why don’t we actually take it a bit more seriously and start writing and recording?’ So about a year ago now, we decided to take it seriously and started writing a few tunes and working out our sound, thinking a bit more seriously about where we wanted it to be, I started singing on the tracks and one thing lead to another and now we’re happy to be putting out an EP’ Julian explains.

Listening to tracks from their debut EP ‘Blow Up’ like the first single ‘Beat On/Beat Off’ and ‘Pretty Little Eyes’ you pick up no trace of Prop’s sound, The Presets are a different beast altogether, managing to sculpt the perfect fusion between dance and rock music with a twist of sleaze. ‘Prop is the heart and soul, where Presets is strictly between the knees and the hips and I’m not talking about thighs, I mean all of the different songs are different looks of different perceptions of masculinity I guess. I mean some songs on the EP like ‘Pretty Little Eyes’ the verse is about this guy talking up how cool he is and how he’s going to the club and he’s going to be the man and he’s going to talk to the women cause he’s so confident you know, but then in the chorus he actually gets to the club and he feels so inadequate with all of the women around, he doesn’t know what to do and that’s just so us, I can’t say how many times that’s happened to guys like us. So I guess we’re still having fun with different perceptions of the modern male’ continues Jules.

It may only be their debut EP, but The Presets have already managed to enlist the help of guest artists, on the track ‘Cookie’ you may hear some familiar guitar doodling, as they use the talents of Daniel Johns. ‘He just plays guitar, he doesn’t sing and it’s not meant to be a big ‘featured’ thing. He liked what we were doing when Julian played him some stuff and said he’d love to come in and do some stuff with us, so we just went in with this really chugging house track and he just played some guitars on that. It was great working with him, he’s really talented, he has great ideas and is really positive’ explains Kim.

Next week is not only set to see them grace the shelves of record stores for the first time, but Friday is also set to see them do their first ever live show at Moulin Rouge, it’s hard to know what to expect from this crazy duo (with the added element of Sam Dixon [Pnau] to the live band). Kim helps shed some light on the subject ‘The shows are going to be fucking crazy! It’s going to be nothing like Prop, there’s going to be very little gear involved. It’s just going to be rock, we just want to fucking rock! We want to make it flexible in the same way that Prop is and have it organic, but really slamming at the same time. Club kids will probably get into it as much as the rock kids, cause we’re meshing those two styles.’

Make sure you check out The Presets’ new EP, out Monday November 17. If you’re in Sydney check them out at Moulin Rouge, 39 Darlinghurst Rd, Kings Cross, with Ajax and Dangerous Dan.