Havilah is the fifth studio album by Australian band The Drones, released in September 2008 by ATP Recordings. The title of the album is a biblical reference to a Shangri-La-esque town (Havilah) with an abundance of gold. It is also the name of a valley near where the album was recorded.The album debuted at #47 on the Australian album charts.
The album was recorded at the mud-brick home of lead singer Gareth Liddiard and his partner/band bassist Fiona Kitschin, outside Myrtleford (at the base of Victoria’s Mount Buffalo).
"It's like a little world unto itself in the forest. It's a beautiful place. You can't always find a good spot to record, but if you can find a house like this that's a bonus." - Liddiard
"It was a great place to write and record. We were literally in the middle of a sub-alpine forest. We had no electricity, just diesel generators. It’d be just about the only record made on a diesel budget." - Liddiard
To shake up his songwriting, Liddiard was reading four books at once, and using internet packages to jumble words and create unimaginable phrases – a technique similar to the labour intensive ‘cut up’ techniques employed by writer William Burroughs and singer David Bowie in the pre-web era, where they cut up words on paper and jumbled them up.
“I made a conscious effort to put my head in the sand. “You start working, you have a coffee in the morning, and any self-doubt falls away" - Liddiard
The album was produced and engineered by Burke Reid (The Mess Hall, Gerling) who had to set up a mobile studio in the house, powered by a diesel engine.
The first single lifted off the album, "The Minotaur", was released as a digital single on July 29, 2008.
The album was nominated for the 2008 J Awards in the Album of the Year category. It was also ranked as #4 in the top 10 albums of 2008 by indie music website Wireless Bollinger.
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