In the Hood

Coming to Canada is going to be a bit of an adjustment for the Hilltop Hoods. The Aussie hip-hop group will not only have to shift seasons—they’ll be leaving the balmy Australian summer and traveling to B.C., Alberta and Ontario (“I don’t even think they make clothes that deal with that sort of cold here,” says MC Pressure, a.k.a. Daniel Smith)—but they’ll also be adjusting to smaller audiences. The Hilltops, rounded out by MC Suffa and DJ Debris, are superstars Down Under, having won numerous awards and headling festivals such as the Big Day Out, which draws crowds of 50,000. Here in Canada, they’ll be playing gigs to a few hundred souls.

“It is definitely like starting from scratch, but it’s cool. It kind of reminds us how hard we used to have to work to get people to shows and it’s a great way to keep you grounded,” Smith says. “I actually like doing the small intimate shows as much as the big ones. There’s less pressure, you can have more fun on stage and you get to go out and mingle with the crowd and have a drink with them after.”

The Hoods’ stop in Victoria will be part of their first-ever cross-country headlining tour. (They were here in September opening for Classified and have played a few B.C. dates mostly “around Victoria and Vancouver and the snowfields, which always do really well for us because there’s a lot of Australians,” says Smith.) The tour is in support of their fifth full-length, State of the Art, released in June 2009 on their new label, Golden Era Records.

“Our contract with our old label was up and we just wanted to go out on our own and call all the shots from start to finish ourselves and just have 100 percent control,” says Smith. “The other main reason was because we just wanted to build a specialist hip-hop label. We wanted to have a family around our label of artists who we think needed a push and who were at the top of their game in Australia, and that’s what we’ve started to do.”

Smith says State of the Art is a bit of a darker affair than previous releases such as The Hard Road and The Calling. Even the most upbeat track on the record, “Chris Farley,” is a tribute to more, erm, extreme partying.

“A lot of the album is pretty dark and then we had that track sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle. It’s our anthem to getting smashed and not worrying about anything. We just thought we’d throw it on there in the end for fun,” says Smith. “Even then, it’s a bit morbid. I think I’m just getting older, even our party songs are about death.”

Well, let’s hope there are no party-related mishaps at their Victoria gig. Catch them at 9 p.m. Monday night at Element, 919 Douglas. tickets $20.