Andy Hopkins adopted the name Hauskey after he was locked out of home one day. “I must have heard ‘Have you seen the house keys? Where are the house keys?’ a thousand times,” he tells Apple Music. “And just hearing those words together–house key–I took the German word for ‘house’, which is haus, and added on ‘key’, and here we are.” The path to releasing his debut EP, Slow, took a lot longer to navigate than the six months Hopkins needed to find his stage name. After starting piano at three and busking from the age of 10, he attended the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. While studying, he opened a music school in Perth before relocating to London for a short stint, after which he moved to Sydney and began writing with artists such as Yorke, Eliott and Angie McMahon. Slow is named in honour of the pace with which he’s approached his career and the EP. “It’s that idea of the EP being a slow journey to being able to release this body of work,” he says. “When you’re trying to do it all yourself, it does take a lot more time than being able to pay a producer to do it all and then pay a mixing engineer and getting photos taken by someone else. It’s easier to do it that way but probably more fulfilling to take the long road.” Here, Hauskey talks us through his EP track by track. Slow “I was heading out to a comedy night with my partner and I was tired, being a little bit of a dick, and we got into a bit of a spat. And I just remember waking up the next day and being like, man, I’m such an idiot. And at that moment when I was having that thought lying in bed, I heard the bin truck driving away and realised that I’d forgotten to take the bins outside, and that was the last straw for my sense of self-worth. So I sat down with the guitar and the rest just sort of poured out from my self-loathing. That was one of the fastest songs I’ve ever written.” Somewhere “It was at that time when the entire world was shut down and you couldn’t actually go anywhere, so I kind of had to go inside a bit and into this imaginary world to try to make sense of things and escape the doom-scrolling and the constant fear of what the rest of the year is going to look like and what next year’s going to look like and the politics that surrounds it. So that was really my attempt at allowing my brain to go somewhere completely imaginary just for a bit. It was totally inspired by that feeling of being trapped.” Silver Lining “When I met my partner I was living in a van, and I don’t understand why, but she still agreed to start dating me. Mentally I probably wasn’t in the best place. She really became the silver lining in this chaotic van-induced mess I was in.” Not Good “It could be about a relationship with one person, but I wanted to have that dual meaning of mental health, and if you’re not okay you should be honest with people and not hide it and not tell people you’re good when you’re not. It’s very important and it’s something that I’m trying to get better at. It’s about being honest and open, which is something that I don’t think you just decide to do, you have to keep working on it.” Plan B “This is my ‘I wonder if I should have studied law’ song. It’s the ‘Shit, I hope this works out’ song. How often do I have those thoughts? Every morning. For 99% of creatives, you’re always on the cusp of the next pay cheque and you’re always living day-to-day to some degree, so it was just one day that all those feelings got a bit much and I was like, ‘I’m just going to have to write a song about it.’” You & Me “Another one about my partner. I’m a bit of an introvert and a bit of a homebody, and I’m so glad I have somebody I can be an introvert with and just kind of block out the world and close out the blinds and not have to think about what’s going on. It’s just a chilled-out stay-at-home song.”