Growing up, Adit Gauchan was taught that life is suffering. Raised a Buddhist, the producer – who comprises Sydney hip-hop group Horrorshow alongside rapper Nick Bryant-Smith – absorbed this central tenet of the religion from an early age. “Sometimes people hear that and they’re like, ‘Oh that’s such a dark, depressing way to look at things.’ It’s more just an acknowledgement of what life is. That’s a certainty: there will be suffering, and it’s about what you do with it that really counts.”
Gauchan and Bryant-Smith leaned on these ideas – and one another – in the two years since their last record, Bardo State, was released in 2017. Six weeks after the album came out, a person very close to Bryant-Smith was diagnosed with stage-four bowel cancer. His priority for the next two years became surgeries and treatment, rather than the touring and press that would normally follow a release.
“Everything turned upside down overnight,” he says. “I had to step up and really take on the carer role and assist them with navigating that whole journey.”
The pair approached our interview with a vulnerability at odds with the boisterous cheekiness ingrained in much of Australian hip-hop. Since recording their debut album in high school, Horrorshow has established itself as a sophisticated outfit, as likely to rap about mental health and philosophy as they are about parties and breakups. They’ve since collected two Aria nominations, critical praise and a dedicated fan base who regularly sell out their tours around the country.
When Bryant-Smith learned of the cancer diagnosis, they had to cancel a bucket-list spot at a US hip-hop festival; but they put on a brave face as they took to the stage at the biggest venues they’d ever played in Australia. They were juggling the challenge of promoting their fourth album “with the kind of news that usually stops your life”, Gauchan says. Bryant-Smith’s reality became the jarring collision of the “sober, somber” silence of the hospital “and then going back out on the road and being in a loud, noisy, not sober, not somber, celebratory place where you’re the centre of attention”.
Eight months later, as they prepared to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of their 2008 debut record The Grey Space with a sold-out national tour, the pair retreated to the coastal town of Currarong for some time away from it all, Gauchan remembers. “Then pretty much the day I got back, my dad calls me: my brother [had] been diagnosed with testicular cancer.”
Less than a year later, in January this year, Gauchan’s younger brother Ashim passed away.
We meet on the release day of Horrorshow’s fifth record, New Normal, and it’s a day that has conjured complex emotions. After getting off an early-morning flight, Gauchan delighted in watching the Spotify streams tick over in real time; he’s giddy as he describes how many hundreds of fans are streaming a song in this very moment.
But Bryant-Smith is racked with nerves. It’s the first time he’s discussed what was happening these past two years with anyone outside his inner circle – a pain he speaks of not only in this interview but on the album itself, which Gauchan describes as Horrorshow’s “most personal record to date”.
New Normal’s cover art shows the pair in a car, dwarfed by the King George V Memorial hospital standing sentinel behind them. Part of the Royal Prince Alfred hospital complex he visited almost daily for two years, Bryant-Smith “got to know that whole complex much better than I would’ve liked to”. The looming building also appears as the backdrop to album prologue 88 Bars. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate the irony of showing you my diary, hoping that you respect my privacy,” Bryant-Smith raps.
“It wasn’t lost on me that our last album was called Bardo State,” he says. “The idea of the Bardo [in Buddhism] is all about being caught between two lives on Earth. Looking back on it, I do feel as if, in some strange way, it foreshadowed what the next couple of years would be like for the two of us: moving back and forth between two lives. And trying to not lose yourself and your shit in that process.”
As Bryant-Smith offers this analogy, he begins to choke up, then apologises. Gauchan quietly retrieves a pouch of tissues from his pocket and tucks one into his friend’s hand. It’s like a secret handshake, their 20 years of friendship distilled into one motion in which you can picture them as kids, surreptitiously passing notes under school desks or sliding contraband against one another’s palms.
“Adit and I have been friends since we were 12 years old and we’ve been brothers for a long time. But the events of the last couple of years have brought us even closer and made us appreciate each other even more,” he says. They learned to “pass the baton”: when one needed to step into the role of carer, the other would handle Horrorshow business. Bryant-Smith gave Gauchan advice; Gauchan gave his friend a copy of The Art of Happiness. (“Shouts to the Dalai Lama,” Bryant-Smith offers sincerely, through tears.)
As well as close friends, family and partners, Bryant-Smith says that when he looks back on the past two years, “in the middle of that storm … it’s Adit and I right there, in the thick of it, together”.
The cinematic and tortured album track Limitless honours Gauchan’s brother; its title is the English translation of his name from Sanskrit. Ashim lived with severe autism and was non-verbal, and their mother always described him as like an angel. “He was this ball of joy,” Gauchan says. “He just wanted to be around people and was always an attention-seeker. That was the energy that he exhibited through this whole struggle, right to the end. He couldn’t say, ‘Why me?’ but it didn’t even feel like that was a thought that had entered his mind.”
The record provided catharsis, but there’s a fear that it comes at a cost.
“When you work on a record, it keeps you in the headspace that led to you creating those songs,” Bryant-Smith says. “I’ve had my moments where I freaked out about that and Adit has reminded me, like, ‘Bro, this is part of the process and we have to let this go’.”
Ultimately, Bryant-Smith says, Horroshow’s music serves the same therapeutic purpose today as it did when they were teenagers navigating young love and monotonous train rides in the inner west of Sydney. “I feel proud that we’ve been able to wrestle with all this stuff and turn it into this record – what is it, like 55 minutes or some shit? – and then give it to everyone else, and hope that they find something in it. We’ve got to have faith in the process and releasing the songs is the next step.”
• New Normal by Horrorshow is out now through Elefant Traks. They are touring Australia through November
