Artist Profile: Handsome Shirt
Handsome Shirt, the Melbourne-based indie pop duo comprised of childhood friends Louis Lam and Ellis Bartholomew, has served not only as a creative outlet but as a sonic representation of the friendship between its two founders since 2020, and now, with the release of their debut EP “Blossom” in August, they have taken a definitive step forward as a group, releasing a cohesive body of work that prefigures what is ahead for the emerging duo.
Louis and Ellis first met as children, living in the countryside of Essex, and immediately bonded over their love of skateboarding. Yet, as their relationship progressed, it became clear that they had a deeper bond as well that was being forged: their shared love of music.
Ellis, who didn’t grow up in a necessarily musical family, was inducted as a music obsessive through his relationship with Louis. As a drummer, Ellis’s first love was hip-hop music, and, as he would go over to Louis’s house and allow him to download entire catalogues of music onto his iPod, his taste expanded many times over.
Louis, meanwhile, grew up in a highly musical household. His parents had a family band, and he has stark memories, as a child, of listening to music with his parents and being asked to close his eyes and respond emotionally to whatever sounds were being played.
Therefore, when the two began experimenting with the instruments that Louis kept in his room, recording piano demos to a cassette player that Louis had received for Christmas, the process felt overwhelmingly natural.
As they grew up, the two separated slightly, going to different secondary schools, but, as they graduated and reconnected, they decided to make good on a dream they had as children: to travel the world together. In the course of their travels they spent some time in Melbourne, an underrated burgeoning cultural and musical hub on the global scene, and, as their friends slowly went home, the two of them decided to stay.
Shortly after, the COVID-19 Pandemic struck, and, in a largely unfamiliar country with an unfounded amount of free time on their hands, the two began, yet again, experimenting musically. From these experimentations came their first singles, including “Red Wine & Swimming”, “Endless Sun”, and “Moments Alone”. With each successive release, one thing became clearer and clearer; the two young artists formed an almost uncannily complementary creative team.
According to Ellis, Louis brings a spark of freedom to their creative process: a complete and total versatility and a profound ability to formulate the idea for a song from scratch.
“I think Louis just brings a lot of raw creativity straight away. A lot of the time I might just say, ‘I want [a song] to sound a bit crunchy and a bit like this song and a bit like that song’... and Louis can just whack out some chords or some keys…. So he can really sort of bring the start of the song, and the raw spark of making music definitely comes from Louis.”
If Louis brings the raw creative spark that helps the duo begin the process of creation, Ellis brings the attention to detail and the refining skill that ultimately begets the song its final form. According to Louis, Ellis’s primary contribution to the creative process comes through his unique ability to hear what might be missing or overdone in a work in progress and utilize his creative talent in order to correct its path.
“El has an attention to detail which I don't have…And El has a lot of patience, but I think it works so well. I can just have an idea and throw it out, throw it out, throw it out. [He] can pick out from 50 ideas, [and say] ‘This is the one that we're going with.’ Which is great, because I just get so lost in that. But he has the ability to sort of choose something and sort of sees an end to it, which I really struggle at.”
Despite the increasing ease of their collaborations, however, Handsome Shirt has, at times, struggled to maintain a consistent output over the years of their existence. As friends, they’re always working and pushing each other further in their own talents, but, as a group, they admittedly have often succumbed to a sort of perfectionism in the process of finalizing and releasing their individual songs.
Therefore, the release of their EP “Blossom”, insofar as it is a cohesive work and each song has a thread that unites it to the whole, is a major step forward for them. In preparing for the EP, they went through their entire hard drive of songs and demos, seeking out anything that shared a sort of sonic resemblance. From this process, they found two songs, and they began building the other two songs of the EP around this thread.
“The whole idea of [Blossom] is growth for us as an artist… We like to think of the first half as maybe a lighter, serene feeling: a happiness, but there's an underpinning. There's darkness behind it. So the second half is maybe a little bit darker, a little bit like falling into these love cycles, and then falling in love and that heartbreak again… So it's growth and death, I suppose, but not as heavy as that. Kind of that sort of circle of maybe growth and falling into the same traps.”
Now, as the duo lays plans to push onward in their output, one thing is decidedly clear; no matter what form it takes, it is their unique creative relationship that will continue to define their ever-oscillating sound.
