Georgia and Caleb Nott, aka the New Zealand electro-pop duo Broods, are sitting in the courtyard garden of an east London bar, blearily jetlagged, wondering whether it's worth shelling out for an upgrade on their flight home to Auckland. "It's only a couple of hundred bucks," Caleb says, as his sister shakes her head. They're not flying business class, then? They stare at me, collapse into giggles. "We'll have to make some serious money first," Caleb replies.
That is not such a distant prospect. Broods are the latest proteges of New Zealand's producer of the moment, Joel Little: the guy who masterminded Lorde's platinum-selling debut album, Pure Heroine, and drew the eyes of the music industry to a country that had only rarely troubled the international charts. Now, New Zealand electro is a definite thing: downbeat, minimalist, performed by young musicians with whom Little seems to collaborate carefully, spinning their raw, unformed talent into something cool, listenable, effortless.
Broods began working with Little last year, but met him several years before, when an indie band called the Peasants, made up of Georgia and a couple of cousins, won the high-school music competition Smokefreerockquest. Caleb – the elder of the two, at 21 to Georgia's 19 – was living in Melbourne at the time; he moved back, they dropped the cousins and began, gradually, to draw out a new sound rooted in electro rather than rock.
"I started listening to a lot of downbeat electronica," Caleb says. "Especially [the Brooklyn-based Danish musician] Oh Land." Georgia nods. "She was probably one of the first artists we really got into who made electronic music," she says. "We just kind of liked it, so we wanted to make it, and we didn't know how. And then Joel taught us how to put our ideas into a form that worked."
And it does work: Broods' first EP, released last January, is an auspicious debut, with Georgia's breathy, emotive vocals floating over spacious synth chords and fractured beats. They have a full album due out in September, featuring nine new songs written in five weeks, between touring with Haim and playing their own shows around the US and the UK.
The Notts began making music together at an early age, growing up in Marlborough and Nelson as the oldest of four musical siblings – the third sister, Olivia, has sung on one of the album tracks, and the youngest is a soloist in her school choir.
Their parents performed Abba covers with a couple of other relatives, and they all grew up hearing a lot of Neil Diamond, Cat Stevens and – pertinently – the Corrs. "That's where we got the idea of having a family band," Georgia says. "Like them, we're three girls and a boy, and we had it all sorted out. I was going to be the lead singer, Caleb was going to be on guitar. Our youngest sister was a baby then – she was going to learn the drums. And Olivia thought the violinist was really pretty, so she wanted to be her."
For now, though, Broods will remain Caleb and Georgia's project – and they're excited about the fact that the wider world is finally paying attention to New Zealand's alternative music scene. The comparisons with Lorde, given that the acts share a producer and, to some degree, a sound, are inevitable, but Broods insist they take them only as a compliment. "She's fucking talented," Caleb says, as Georgia nods. "She's been like a leader," she says. "She's paved the way."
