Fifteen years on, the seductive glamour of HTRK’s Marry Me Tonight is more potent than ever

Original release date: 2 February, 2009
Label: Blast First Petite

HTRK’s debut album, Marry Me Tonight, was hampered by a troubled rollout and the fact it felt so different from anything else at the time. But HTRK always existed in their own world and, 15 years later, the record still feels like an open invitation to discover it.

“Desire was a kind of a predator or a stalker,” Jonnine Standish told Juno in 2012. She was talking about a central theme behind HTRK’s Marry Me Tonight, the Australian band’s seductive 2009 album. Originally released on Blast First Petite, but now repressed by Ghostly International to chime with its 15th anniversary, its nine songs drip with both glamour and gloom, capturing seedy intimacy in complex, thorny portraits.

Recorded in February 2006, the band’s debut LP was their only album made as a trio. Standish, Nigel Yang and the late Sean Stewart had ambitions to make something of a pop album after their 2005 EP Nostalgia. An idea encouraged by the legendary Rowland S. Howard, who co-produced the album. “There is a particular type of romance that Rowland embodies,” they said in 2010. “The Birthday Party has this romance too, beneath the violence and delirium and oblivion.”

That cocktail of danger and passion is clear from the opener, HA. An iteration of earlier track Look What’s Been Done, it takes its self-destructive debauchery and grants it a newfound sheen. “Can I be out of line? Can we get back together?” Standish sings, and to hear these lines with such clarity gives it an enticing allure. The band were inspired by films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris and François Ozon’s Swimming Pool. They cite the film subgenre “sunlit noir”, too, which is apt given how their dark stories were no longer obscured by lo-fi production and noise.

Marry Me Tonight sounded as monumental as it did because it marked the first time the band worked in a big studio. They reminisce about Stewart marvelling at the patch bay and explain that they spent three days rehearsing before diving into extensive recording sessions. “Sean did most of his takes in one go,” explains Yang. “He spent ages getting his sound right and then nailed his parts one by one.” Stewart’s basslines were crucial, and given his strong vision for the band’s sound, Yang once said that his basslines were the songs themselves. You can hear that on a track like Your Mistress Turns to Dust, where its agile melody guides you down a deliriously rocky path. Even songs with more robust arrangements feel led by its pulse; Waltz Real Slow has a bobbing rhythm, accompanied by handclaps and simmering guitar riffs – you can imagine slow dancing with a cigarette in hand.

Despite the thrill of recording in a professional space, Marry Me Tonight had a nightmarish rollout. It took three years after recording the album for it to be officially released, with the delay attributed to an argument over rights. “We signed a contract without reading it,” they explain, “and it cost [manager] Paul Smith a bucketload of money to buy the album.” It also leaked early, deflating a lot of the impact it could’ve had.

Standish acknowledges that the album was at odds with the landscape of the time: “The production style maybe didn’t make sense in 2009.” But HTRK were always a singular band, and the album is rife with come-hither invitations into their unique world. She’s Seventeen has an irresistible lurch that eventually traps you in its cloudy atmosphere. Yang recalls labouring over the song in post-production. “It caused some tension ’cause I was getting a bit obsessive,” he explains. Standish remembers that both she and Rowland found it “humorously exasperating”, noting that Yang tried to “make a case for cutting [an] offending section out and replacing it with 30 seconds of silence”. Other tracks are perfect encapsulations of their slick songcraft: Rent Boy was originally meditative and cavernous when called Look at That Girl on Nostalgia, but here it sounds like a pop song has emerged from the murk – like hearing properly recorded Les Rallizes Dénudés songs after years of crummy bootlegs. Album highlight Fascinator has the bass lower in the mix to make room for a woozy guitar arrangement, and all that remains is dreamy, sensual ecstasy.

It would be accurate to label Marry Me Tonight a transitional album, but HTRK’s entire career has been driven by change. In 2009, Rowland passed away, and then Stewart died by suicide the year after. Standish and Yang have mentioned the continuing impact these two have had on their artistic practice. The former often played against type, which encouraged the band to surprise fans with each album; their most recent LP, 2021’s Rhinestones, is a gothic country album inspired by Neil Young. Stewart continues to shape the band, at least as some sort of spectral entity. Standish once lit a candle and asked him to enter her body and make her a “sexy, badass bass player”. Yang notes that their later albums have eschewed “fill[ing] his presence” – the lack of bass is in memory of him. All of this feels emblematic of HTRK’s music at large, where every song feels like you’ve been irrevocably changed by a lover or friend. A polysemic lyric on Panties sums it up: “How can I keep in mind what’s out of sight?”