When Faker released our first EP, Sound Out Loud in 2001, I was working the nightshift at a refuge in Sydney.
Teenage Werewolf was added to High Rotation pretty much immediately, and played for 9 months straight on Triple J. We couldn’t afford to tour more than once or twice during this time. Touring for us meant playing the Hopetoun Hotel (3 blocks from the refuge), then borrowing a car, renting a trailer for our bass amp, and driving to Melbourne for the weekend. Making it back in one piece so we wouldn’t get fired from our various day jobs.
The best of that time happened in rehearsal rooms, twice a week, as we tried to figure out who and what we were, fluctuating from 3, to 4, to 5 piece, and back again. During this time, while our song seemed to be waking people up in the mornings on Australian radio, and guiding them home from work each day, I was checking in on residents at the refuge, ensuring that they didn’t overdose through the night, having conversations about their lives, and in-between these moments I’d sneak my guitar into work, to set about writing the next Faker song.
From an archival perspective, Sound Out Loud, is a great representation of what we wanted to be. Authentic, brash, dreamy. Good songs built from real experiences, with a little bit of imagination woven through it. In our personal lives we weren’t there yet, but in our music we could be. Teenage Werewolf, somebody once pointed out to me is a song I must have unconsciously written about coming out, and they we right, to some degree. I Know / She Knows was about struggling with the way people do and don’t communicate what they know about attraction, and each other. INDT (short for, ‘it’s not decision time’) was my first ADHD soother, a song about forgetting the pressure and getting on with it. Gun was the song I wrote after the end of my first relationship with another guy, trying to make sense of what it was, and what had happened.
The ‘Out Loud’ in Sound Out Loud was about music, it was about coming out (which I’d done personally, but not publicly), more than that it was about finding out who and what we could be. The ‘Sound’ is what you hear. ‘And if I sound / a little too loud / decisions made / you’re coming ‘round.’
We printed somewhere between 500-1000 copies on CD at the time. People seemed to know and love the radio song, but they didn’t know who we were right away. The ones who found us though, they held onto us. This EP hasn’t been available anywhere since it came out in 2001. I’m making it available this year, because it was always meant to be heard… You can’t name something Sound Out Loud and keep it quiet forever.

- Nathan Hudson