The Presets, Supplied
For the frontperson of one of Australia’s most successful contemporary acts, Julian Hamilton has an ambivalent relationship with singing.
“We hadn’t really considered that I would be a singer in the band,” Hamilton tells Check Check, looking back on when he and drummer Kim Moyes founded The Presets in 2003.
But, with the encouragement of Modular Recordings founder Steve Pavlovic, Hamilton came around to the idea. And, despite some growing pains – “I didn’t know how to be a singer in a band,” Hamilton says – by 2008, The Presets were bona fide indie-pop stars.
Not only did Hamilton and Moyes generate chaos during headline sets at Splendour in the Grass, Groovin the Moo, V Festival and Big Day Out, but their second album, Apocalypso, debuted at number one. Its lead single, “My People,” is one the defining Australian songs of the era, combining Hamilton’s pop smarts with Moyes’ club beats and the tear-down-the-walls energy of a pub rock anthem.
The Presets cleaned up at the 2008 ARIA Awards, winning six awards including Album of the Year and Best Group. In 2010, journalists Toby Creswell, Craig Mathieson and John O’Donnell listed Apocalypso at #61 in their book The 100 Best Australian Albums.
The Presets haven’t gone away, but they’ve also never returned to the heights of Apocalypso and their 2005 debut, Beams. Hamilton and Moyes have released just two further albums, 2012’s Pacifica and 2018’s Hi Viz, and in recent years, they’ve switched focus from albums to singles.
“We’re always making music,” says Hamilton, “[but] we don’t feel the same pressure as maybe we once did.”
Hamilton and Moyes celebrated The Presets’ 20th anniversary in 2023 with an extensive DJ tour. They’ve got a bunch of festival dates scheduled in the second half of 2025, including Mackay’s Rhythm And The Reef Festival in August.
Hamilton speaks to Check Check about DJing, playing live, his listening habits, and learning how to be a singer in a band.
Check Check: It’s been nothing but singles from The Presets for the last handful of years. Are you working on new music?
Julian Hamilton: Yeah, always. [In 2023], we celebrated our 20th anniversary with the band and we’re always making music, but I feel like the pressure to release new music and stay current and stay active, we don’t feel the same pressure as maybe we once did.
Is it a case of not wanting to release things you’re not proud of?
Yeah. We are always working on music because it’s what we love doing the most, but I think things just get in the way. We’ve also got families, teenage children who we’re raising. There’s all these little twists and turns that life takes. We’re not in the studio all the time like we once were.
What are your kids listening to? Are you discovering music through your kids?
Well and truly. My eldest daughter just loves 90s R&B, like I think every girl in Year 9. They just love their 90s R&B, which I’ve got no problem with at all. Old Kanye. Fugees. All that old stuff.
My kids tend to enjoy music in such a different way. They love Frank Ocean, for instance, but they don’t really get into albums as much. These days it’s all just playlists and constant music that’s flowing at them through TikTok. It seems to be a very different world from the one that I remember when I was their age, checking out Public Enemy and Red Hot Chili Peppers albums.
Were they some of your formative artists?
Yeah. Maybe not so much the Chili Peppers, but I really liked The Prodigy and some of those early electronic, techno, dance albums, and then hip hop. I really liked kind of otherworldly music that sounded like it was made by machines.
To be honest, I was never really into rock music, but anything that sounded like it was made by a machine piqued my curiosity. I thought, “How do they do that? How do they make that beat keep going like that?” That was the stuff that really intrigued me when I was young, and I guess it still does today.
Do you still get excited by music in a similar way?
That’s a tricky question. Sometimes I’ll hear a track and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s a fun jam.” But I can’t think of anything that’s really excited me, like, “Holy shit, wow, this is really inspiring,” since the first time I heard Aphex Twin. That was probably the last time I listened to music and I was like, “Holy shit, wow.”
Now when I hear new stuff it’s like, “Oh cool. How’d they do that? I want to try that.” I’m too kind of involved to be super blown away by something new. But every once in a while I do hear an album that I do really enjoy. I really enjoyed the new Beyoncé album, for instance.
How elaborate is The Presets’ current live show?
To be honest, our live show hasn’t really changed since we first started doing it 20 years ago. It’s me singing and playing keyboards and it’s Kim playing drums and playing the odd keyboard and then just jumping around on stage yelling the songs. And it’s kind of worked for us over the years.
I must admit, after doing a whole bunch of DJ shows, it’s really fun to be back up there performing all of our own music again and hearing the live drums on stage and having that energy and all the lights.
So doing the 20th anniversary DJ tour didn’t make you think about becoming full-time DJs?
It’s certainly more economical when you’re turning up to a gig with a USB stick with someone else’s music. But our job first and foremost is performing our own music. It is fun to do the DJ gigs because you get to tell a bit more of a broader story than what you are able to do when you’re just doing your own music.
I will say, from a personal perspective, it is nice to have a break from the singing and all the responsibility that comes with having to sing for 90 minutes. It’s quite demanding physically. So, I guess they’re both really great fun, but we’re looking forward to actually getting out there and performing our own stuff live again.
What’s your relationship like with singing? Is it first nature, do you sing all the time?
That’s a good question. Not really. When we first started this band, we were going to be like Basement Jaxx or Chemical Brothers and just get guest singers in. And as we were writing the songs, I would just sing them to write the words and phrasing and just get the idea of the song down. And then at one point our label guy, Pav, just said, “Why don’t you just sing these songs?”
We hadn’t really considered that I would be a singer in the band. So, I kind of fell into it by accident. It took me a good year to learn how to do it on stage as well, because I didn’t know how to be a singer in a band. I sang in school choirs and stuff when I was a kid, but I never really was a singer. I was a piano player.
I remember sound guys saying to me, “You should enunciate your words more clearly,” because I was hiding behind the mic being all cool and moody, trying to be Ian Curtis, trying to be dark and weird. But then eventually I became more confident to belt it out and be a bit more of a performer. And 20 years later, I’m still singing in a band.
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The Presets
Sat 23 Aug – Rhythm and the Reef, West Mackay QLD (w/ Amy Shark, The Jungle Giatns & more)
Sat 10 Jan – Ocean Sounds Festival, Phillip Island VIC (w/ The Teskey Brothers, Thelma Plum & more)
Tickets via the band’s website
