A bassist who composes on a ukulele: an interview

For years, the bassist has been cast as the steady anchor of a band: locked to the root, minding the low end, holding everything in place while singers and guitarists get the glory. Flip that script and you get something closer to the world of Freya Mitchell, the bassist and accidental songwriter for the Brisbane four-piece Hollow Coast. Mitchell writes the band's melodies on a four-stringed ukulele, often on the back steps of a share house in West End, before translating those lines onto her fretless bass.

It is an unusual workflow in an indie landscape crowded with guitar-wielding frontpeople, and it sits somewhere between folk tenderness and the warm hum of post-rock. Hollow Coast have built a small but devoted following across Australia's east coast, with frequent stops in Melbourne and Sydney, and Mitchell's gentle, slightly off-kilter songbook has begun to attract attention from programmers at Triple J and bookers at venues like The Triffid in Fortitude Valley. We caught up with her between soundcheck and a meat pie at the merch table to talk shop, stubbornness, and the strange alchemy of writing harmonies you can hum on an instrument barely bigger than a paperback.

From garage to garden: how the ukulele became a songwriting tool

Mitchell did not set out to subvert anything. She bought her first ukulele for forty dollars at a flea market in West End during a weekend when her bass had a busted preamp. She was broke, the borrowed amp was on the fritz, and the tiny instrument was what she could afford. "I started picking out the chorus I'd been humming in the shower, and it just worked," she says. The cheap strings buzzed, the action was high, and she had to retune it after every song, but the limitations became the point.

Writing on a ukulele forces a kind of economy. Where a guitar gives you four or five comfortable chord shapes per key, a ukulele nudges you into bright, often unresolved voicings that feel closer to a music box than to a campfire strummer. Mitchell found herself reaching for minor sevenths and suspended chords almost instinctively, and those choices bled back into her bass playing. Lines that might once have walked the root started to climb into the chord, finding countermelodies that sit somewhere between Jaco Pastorius and a slightly tipsy Joni Mitchell.

Translating sparkle into thump: the bass lines behind the songs

On Hollow Coast's new EP, recorded at a converted warehouse in Collingwood over three weeks last winter, the bass lines do something most indie records never manage. They sing. The opening track, "Letter to a Lighthouse," begins with a piano figure that sounds stolen from a Sarah Siskind record, then drops into a bassline that traces the vocal melody an octave below, doubling the sadness rather than cushioning it. Mitchell says this is a direct inheritance from her ukulele writing habit.

If you write a hook on a ukulele, you internalise the melody as a singable thing, not a chord-chart thing. When she picks up the bass, she treats it as a second voice. The result is a record where the low end behaves like a co-lead, weaving around the vocals rather than locking to the kick drum. Producer Lina Verrall, who has also worked with acts out of the Melbourne scene including Banoffee and Maple Glider, encouraged her to lean into it. "Freya kept wanting to simplify," Verrall recalls, "and I kept telling her, no, give me the weird version, the one with the extra note."

Rehearsing in loungerooms and loading docks

Hollow Coast rehearse in a converted laundromat in Annerley that doubles as a community print studio. Three nights a week they wheel the dryers to the wall, lay down rugs, and play until the neighbours knock. It is a familiar story for Australian indie bands: the rehearsal space is always borrowed, often shared with a yoga class or a ceramics collective, and almost never soundproofed. Brisbane City Council's amplified noise rules are tighter than they used to be, and the band has been chased out of two share-house garages by July noise complaints from the landlord upstairs. Bands here learn early to think creatively about space, and some have ended up recording in a fire station or in the back of a butcher's shop, anything with thick walls and a landlord who does not mind a kick drum at midnight.

Touring brings its own quirks. The band drove the seventeen hours from Brisbane to Melbourne last March in a 1998 Corolla held together by cable ties and optimism, played two shows at the Old Bar in Fitzroy, slept on fans' floors in Brunswick, and turned around to drive home. They have learned to map every gig around a service station with a decent coffee and a clean bathroom. Mitchell laughs that the most important piece of band equipment is now a clipboard with a printed route, a jar of instant coffee, and a bag of shapes for the long stretches.

Where independent music lives in Australia

Australia's independent music infrastructure is famously scrappy but unusually generous. Triple J remains the single most important tastemaker for a band like Hollow Coast, and a single spin on Home & Hosed can move the needle from six hundred monthly listeners to six thousand overnight. APRA AMCOS, the local rights organisation, collects performance royalties from pubs, clubs, and festivals, and redistributes them to writers and publishers, which means a song that gets regular rotation on community radio can quietly pay the rent for a year.

The live ecosystem runs through venues that survive on thin margins: The Tote in Melbourne, which was nearly lost in 2010 before a community campaign saved it; the Lansdowne in Sydney, which reopened under new management in 2022; and The Triffid, a beloved Brisbane room built inside a converted submarine fuel depot in the Valley. Festivals like Laneway, Falls, and Golden Plains give smaller acts a chance to reach crowds in Adelaide, Perth, and Hobart, although the 2020s have forced many of these events to reset their models after pandemic closures, rising insurance premiums, and new superannuation obligations for casual musicians.

Records to hear if you love Hollow Coast

• Adrianne Lenker, "songs" and "instrumentals", for proof that a small acoustic instrument can carry enormous feeling, and for songwriting that favours bruise over polish.
• Aldous Harding, "Party" and "Designer", for melodies that pivot on a ukulele-adjacent strangeness, with lyrics that reward close listening.
• Adrian Crowley, "Some Blue Morning", if you want to hear what a fretless, voice-like bass can do when it leads instead of follows.
• Julia Jacklin, "Pre Pleasure", for a contemporary Australian take on quiet intensity, recorded in the same kind of small studios that Hollow Coast use.

Mitchell will spend the next few months writing the band's second LP, this time on a baritone ukulele she tracked down in a pawn shop on Brunswick Street. The full record is due out through a small Melbourne label in early autumn, with launch shows planned in Brisbane and Sydney and a tentative Victorian run once the lineup at the Corner Hotel is confirmed. The first single from the new EP goes live on Bandcamp next Friday.