Sign of the Hynes

Sometimes albums come along with little or no fanfare, hype or even expectation and almost surreptitiously manage to quietly blow your mind. Nina Hynes’ second release, Staros, is such an album.

If you thought that the Dublin chanteuse had disappeared into the ether, you could be forgiven. Having released her debut mini-album, Creation, in 1999 to fine reviews, Nina Hynes became a regular on the live circuit. Then, she seemed to vanish.

“I did,” she laughs quickly. “I disappeared.” It transpires that Nina decamped to the USA with her band of the time for two East-coast tours. However, when they returned to Ireland, the band promptly split up.

“When I got the band together, I got so immersed in that and became so in love with just singing and being surrounded by these amazing musicians that I forgot how to write a song again and how to play again,” she admits. “So I had to go back and focus on that. I felt so lost when the band broke up, so that was a big challenge for me.”

It is a challenge that she has risen to, and then some. The 12 songs on her new album display a newfound maturity to her songwriting and a willingness to innovate and experiment to boot, from the straight-ahead pop of single, ‘Mono Prix’ to the more otherworldly charms of ‘Time Flies’ or ‘Dive’.

Since her old band called it a day, Nina has returned Stateside for four solo tours, building up a sizable fanbase across the Atlantic – Staros is being released in the USA in September. The album was recorded on-and-off over the last year and a half, with co-production duties handled magnificently by former Frames guitarist, Dave Odlum. I put it to Hynes that Staros sounds really coherent and consistent for an album that took 18 months to record.

“We did 10 days of recording, two weeks of mixing and then realised that there was still so much work to be done. That was this time last year,” she recalls. “We recorded in France in an amazing studio and then put all the songs onto computer, the ones that weren’t already mixed. But it is weird the way that it is cohesive as an album because it is quite diverse. But I just followed my heart with it every inch of the way and I never worried about it.”

The result is a large, modern, varied album, where every song has a hell of a lot going on within its three or four minutes. Hynes herself describes it as a mixture of “huge noise and tiny whispers”. She explains: “Every sonic detail, every single note on the album was thought about: there were no mistakes.”

The album title originates from a character in Terence Mallick’s The Thin Red Line, who saved the lives of the soldiers under his command by disobeying a direct order, but it has taken on a life of its own in Hynes’ head: “Staros, in my mind, stands for this parallel universe where it’s perfect: it looks like earth but isn’t earth. Peter Reddy deserves great credit for manipulating the artwork on the album to look like this parallel planet.”

Despite the studio wizardry and the variety of sound effects that went into Staros, it is still a very human album, exploring those age-old themes of love, life and getting on with it all. It is also a pop album at heart, filled with deceptively simple songs, bursting at the seams with soaring melodies that float into your inner ear without so much as a by-your-leave, where they take up residence for weeks (and counting).

“I’m a pop kid at heart,” she gushes. “Well, part of me is. I grew up on pop,” she breaks into a chorus of ‘My Girl Lollypop’, before admitting, “If I was six, I’d probably be into Britney Spears. The unfortunate thing about a lot of pop is that they just stick to the simple parts without any of the interesting, beautiful part, so it becomes bland. Pop gets a bad name but it is actually an amazing thing.”

She pays tribute to Dave Odlum for his sterling work in helping to determine Staros’ unique sound. But Odlum isn’t the only Frames connection on the album. Various members of that band contribute to the music, including a certain Glen Hansard, who provides some beautiful backing vocals to ‘Universal’. Perhaps one of the most wonderful things about the song is that you don’t even realise that it is Hansard singing unless you read the credits, as his voice melds almost seamlessly with Hynes’ own.

“We’ve sung together for about 10 years and our voices just seem to go really well together,” Hynes says. “I used to busk a lot and the idea of doing gigs freaked me out, and Glen saw me busking and he brought me into a studio where we recorded five songs. He has always encouraged me.”

Alongside the various samples, loops and effects that embellish the songs on Staros, its human heart still beats strong, with judicious use of guitar, xylophone, piano, harp, bass, trumpet, cello, violin and Nina’s remarkable voice, a mixture of wide-eyed innocence and knowing self-deprecation. It is a very brave, courageous album, but this boldness didn't always come so easily.

“I remember when I wrote string lines for Creation, I was nearly scared to play or sing them to the string players because I thought ‘these are not real string lines, I just wrote these on the piano’, but now I have more confidence to say ‘this is what I hear in my head’,” she explains. “I don’t see any rules any more. It’s just about trying to take a song somewhere else. There’s a part of me that is really straight ahead, but there’s a much bigger part that isn’t.”