INTERVIEW: Broods Talk Song Meanings On 'Conscious' & Tove Lo Duet | Track By Track

Rejoice, Team Broods. Your favorite brother-sister electro duo have finally released their highly-anticipated sophomore LP, Conscious. It features 13-tracks, including a collaboration with Tove Lo, a Lorde co-write, and, of course, their aggressive lead single, "Free."

After creating waves in 2014 with their debut album, Evergreen, which included the brilliant “Bridges,” the New Zealand pair gained notoriety all around the world, particularly the festival scene with sets at Lollapalooza and FireFly just to name a few.

For their return to the scene collection, Georgia and Caleb Nott decided to experiment with live instrumentation. With the help of their longtime producer Joel Little (Lorde, Sam Smith), the duo was able to create a body of work that kept in line with their formula and yet drench the collection with a heavier sound.

Broods recently took to iHeartRadio HQ in New York City for an exclusive interview to talk about the meaning behind each song on their new album in another installment of Track By Track because what better way to hear the nitty gritty about an album than from the actual artist themselves? Take a look below.

Broods Break Down Their Tracks On Conscious

Track 1: "Free"

Caleb: "I remember the first time I made the beat, which later on became the song, a couple of months later. [We were] just on tour. We were in Denver, playing a show. And then ..."

Georgia: "When we got into the studio, we were having one of those days where we were trying to work on something that we just couldn't get right, but people kept saying, 'Can you please write this damn song?' [laughs] We were just not feeling it, so we wrote this song called 'Free' that was really aggressive. [It's] all about trying to express that we can't write that way. We can't be anything that we're not, and we wanna always have that integrity. Songwriting [is] what makes writing music and being musicians and playing live music really special for us."

Track 2: "We Had Everything"

Georgia: "'We Had Everything' was actually another one of the first songs that we ever wrote for the album, ever. It's super kind of happy sounding."

Caleb: "And eerie."

Georgia: "You read the lyrics and it's bloody depressing, which is one of our specialties. No, it's cool, and I guess it's like almost a way of expressing things that are really difficult to express but making it disguised."

Track 3: "Are You Home"

Georgia: "This was a really cool one to write. . . . We wrote it with a couple of guys from this production group called Captain Cuts. They wrote that song 'Shut Up and Dance.'"

Caleb: "It was the first time we've ever met these guys/wrote anything with these guys. We just clicked as people, first, which is really important. We just hung out for an hour and we got along really well and then we had only four hours left, so we wrote that song in like four hours."

Track 4: "Heartlines"

Caleb: "[We and Lorde] were just both in Auckland that week, so we thought we'd jump in the studio together and see what happens and it went really well, and went along really naturally and organically."

Georgia: "We've worked for the same producer, Joel Little. Well, he wrote ..."

Caleb: "Her album and our album."

Georgia: "[He] co-wrote her whole album and co-wrote our whole album, so we kinda had that connection there, so we worked on 'Heartlines' with Joel Little as well. Joel just asked if she wanted to come into a session 'cause we were working on album stuff, and we hadn't done a co-write for a while. We decided to kind of break up all the like ..."

Caleb: "Sometimes you need to bring in an extra person to kind of [make] something fresh, and ..."

Georgia: "... different perspective on things. Because you have a different brain that works in a different way, and it's it's cool. You learn so much from collaboration. She's super enthusiastic. It's so nice to have somebody that expresses how excited they are about writing stuff."

Caleb: "It's fun."

Georgia: "'Some people you can't read them, and it's so hard to see if they like it or not. She's very open-book and in the studio. [She had] really easy energy to feed off, which is cool."

Track 5: "Hold The Line"

Caleb: "We've actually been working with another producer on this album as well. A young girl called Alex Hope from Australia and she worked a lot on Troye Sivan's Blue Neighbourhood, and stuff like that. We started off actually working on a song that we had already written and we wanted her to come in and help us with the production and stuff like that, but then the next day, we just thought we'd write a fresh song because we get along with her really well and she's like, one of our best friends now." [laughs]

Track 6: "Freak Of Nature" featuring Tove Lo

Caleb: "It was the one that we got Alex in to do the production on, as well."

Georgia: "'Freak of Nature' we wrote quite a while back at home in New Zealand. We just had a few days off, so Caleb and I just went into a studio by ourselves and created some demos and stuff and we had this song sitting there for a while."

Caleb: "It was a demo. [We] didn't do anything on it, but we loved the demo 'cause it was so raw and so emotional. We started to get to know Tove Lo, and we were doing this festival at the same time as her called Osheaga in Montreal. After the festival, we had a few drinks and I showed her a bunch of the music we'd been working on. I showed her 'Freak of Nature' and she said that it was her favorite, and then, I asked her to sing on it and then she did. . . .It's just like super heavy, emotional [song] and it's a theme that is never covered in pop music."

Georgia: "It's very expressive. When I sing it or hear it, it's like a massive release. . . . When I listen to it, I still try not to cry."

Track 7: "All Of Your Glory"

Georgia: "All Of Your Glory'" ... we actually [did in] same session as 'Freak of Nature.'"Caleb: "I was doing something in the studio room, just working on beats or something. I was finishing off the production for 'Ease' on [Troy's] record and Georgia was just in the studio 'cause we had Melvin's pump organ just sitting there. The sound of it is just incredible."

Georgia: "It's beautiful."

Caleb: "You have to pump your feet to make the noises go."

Georgia: "Yeah, it's pretty wicked." [laughs]

Caleb: "She just came in after half an hour and was like, 'Hey, um, can we turn on some mics? I've written a song." I went, 'Okay, yeah! Sweet.' . . . .I didn't have anything to do with it at all." [laughs]Georgia: "We kind of belt it out, but didn't want to belt it out too much 'cause it's such a raw thing. It's very vulnerable, the song, and the theme. I think that's my specialty. Just the really vulnerable [stuff]."

Track 8: "Recovery"

Caleb: "We did about three, four different versions. [laughs] I like to get it right. 'Cause I think for a year, or like, at least six months, I was like, 'This song can't go on the record, I don't like it.'"

Georgia: "The song, itself was there, but we just couldn't figure out how to complement it with the production."

Caleb: "Sonically, we couldn't get it right. Well, we started writing with Alex, but then we started working on it without her for a while. But then we brought her back in to try and figure it out, and then it just kinda all fell into bits. [laughs] So thanks, Alex."

Georgia: "Yeah, it's a really cool one to sing as well, live."

Track 9: "Couldn't Believe"

Caleb: "I think we just wanted to show two polar opposite sides of the record."

Georgia: "'Free''s so aggressive."

Caleb: "'Couldn't Believe'" is aggressive in it's own way, but it's a totally different kind of aggression."

Georgia: "I think it's one of the coolest tracks to play live. It just translates so well in a live setting that we were already playing it live and so we wanted to share it online as well, so people could go home from a show [and listen]. When we were supporting Ellie Goulding, we wanted people [to] go home from those shows and be able to actually go find that song. Because that was always the one that people connect with. It was the last song of the set, and people left with that one in their heads."

Track 10: "Full Blown Love"

Caleb: "This is basically a time where I was really obsessed with one group, and wanted to take stuff from theirs -- not steal it, but make it into a more Broods-y thing, you know?"

Georgia: "They had so many cool sounds in their music."

Caleb: "It's this group called Kate Boy, a Swedish group. The way that they put a bass guitar with their beats. I just was really intrigued with it 'cause the rhythms in it were just like nothing I'd really sonically, heard before and trying do it service, we spent a while trying to get that right and then, absolutely Brood-ified it in the chorus. But it was another one that took a long time to get right, production-wise, and [we] played around with sounds forever."

Track 11: "Worth The Fight"

Georgia: "Joel Little, our producer ... He has two daughters, and one of them was four at the time and she didn't want to go to the supermarket with her mum or something, so we said that she could come hang out in the studio with us. She just kind of sits in-between me and Caleb, and we're listening to this instrument, scribbling words and I was humming melodies, and Caleb's humming melodies, and Joel's in his chair doing this ... That's what he does, and then Amy just starts humming to herself while she's writing scribbles."

Caleb: "She goes up and does it into Joel's ear, and Joel's just like, 'Okay, cool, that's cute.' She went back to him a second time, sung the exact same melody, and then he's like, 'Okay, yeah, I got it.' Then she went back a third time like, 'No, Dad. You should use this.'"

Georgia: "She sits down and she goes, 'Use that, Dad.' [laughs] I think she did it three times."

Caleb: "And then he's like, 'Okay, yeah, I got it.' Then she went back a third time like, 'No, Dad.' She's four."

Caleb: "And he's like, 'Actually, yeah. Guys, Amy's [onto something].' And then, yeah."

Georgia: "It's obvious we took the first one and then kind of developed it and made it super depressing." [laughs]

Caleb: "Even when he plays that song now, she goes, 'Hey Dad, I helped on this one, eh?'" [laughs]

Track 12: "Bedroom Door"

Georgia: "'Bedroom Door' was another very early track that we worked on. We played it live for a while ... just half a song because we hadn't written it all. It's just one of those songs that had been sitting there for ages, and we just didn't really get sick of it and when we finished it, we were like, 'Yeah, this is actually a really nice, easy, chill, meaningful track.'"

Caleb: "I always thought it was like an ultimate teenage girl's slumber party song that they all do their nails to like a classic movie girl's slumber party, which is probably not what they're like."Georgia: "The theme is not very slumber party or whatever."

Caleb: "No." [laughs]

Georgia: "The theme is like a slumber party between a married couple. [laugh] I guess the song is more for people that have been in a long-term relationship, and they've had a really hard day, and find comfort in just being completely secure in your relationship with somebody and just being able to offload all your sh*t without being judged, which is nice. The song is just all about letting all your walls down because you know it's a safe place and it's cool. I guess it's just the next step after all the falling in love songs."

Track 13: "Conscious"

Georgia: "We named the album Conscious before we wrote 'Conscious.'"

Caleb: "It was a last-minute song. [We made it] literally two days before we delivered the album."

Georgia: "We had to push back delivering the album, 'cause we really wanted to put it on." [laughs]

Caleb: "It's one of those songs that was actually the best combination of Georgia and myself. You'd write a song and it's more toward someone else's vibe, but this one was completely neutral."

Georgia: "Yeah. It's got the haunting kind of moody lyrics and sad lullaby feel that I always go for, and it's got like the ..."

Caleb: "Super aggressive production." [laughs]

Georgia: "But it's cool, it's definitely one of our favorites. I don't know if it's just 'cause it's the most recent. [laughs] It's also just awesome to play live as well."

If you like what you read, head over to iTunes to download a copy of Conscious.

Photo: Rachel Kaplan for iHeartRadio