Balancing multiple feelings, multiple bands, and multiple art forms is something that makes Hemmett the multifaceted singer, keyboardist, photographer, graphic designer, etc. (how much time you got, pal? She does it all) into the talent that she is.

Hemmett is the foundation of what makes LEATHERS into the purple-blue dreamscapes that they strive to be. They use sound, colour, and visuals to escape any boundaries of conventionality in music. Hemmett wants the colours of the elements she works with to leak into each other, and with this leaking comes the reminder that musicianship isn’t just about what you’re trying to say, but how you’re saying it too.

From her Vancouver apartment, Hemmett tells us about the process of crafting an entire aesthetic for the band’s debut album, Ultraviolet, set for release by Artoffact Records on August 16.

“I always wanted to have a project where the visuals and the music worked together in a cool way.”

— Shannon Hemmett (LEATHERS)

“I always wanted to have a project where the visuals and the music worked together in a cool way,” she tells RANGE. She cites the graphic works of Vaughn Oliver next to the dreamscapes of the Cocteau Twins, as well as the design of Anton Corbin in collaboration with the songs of Depeche Mode as major influences.

“All the videos, the photography, covers, the design work, that’s all me,” she says. “That’s something I take on. It’s something I love to do; it’s part of the vocabulary of the project for me to choose the typefaces, choose the colours and plan the outfits.” 

Her design, outfits and music have a way of placing us inside a timewarp, where we can see and hear through the lens of the ‘90s with the acute eyes and ears of a developed modern-day mind. She references the likes of David Bowie and Annie Lennox as influences on her own style of dress, citing their more gender fluid presentation as something she likes to work with.

For Hemmett, that fluidity comes not only in presentation, but in process as well. It’s that same fluidity that helps her transition from her role as keyboardist with ACTORS into the lead singer of LEATHERS.

“It’s something I always wanted to do,” she says. “I came to singing pretty late in life, so it definitely helped, me performing and touring with ACTORS, to build more confidence to jump from ACTORS to that lead role in LEATHERS.” 

Somewhere along the road of Ultraviolet’s creation, the songwriting, instrumentals and aesthetic began to amalgamate into a starry, synth-driven, hip-thrusting cocktail. “I’ve discovered that it’s such a layered thing, there’s so much texture you can add that is musical in different ways,” she says. “In some of the LEATHERS songs we have a drone texture that’s kind of underneath the rhythms, or there’s guitar that’s purely texture and it’s not necessarily melodic, but then, the vocal melodies are quite strong. So it’s like all these things mixing together to create the music.”

It’s this mingling of layers that gives Ultraviolet its sound of nocturne. Think late night drives, dancing city lights and glittering ocean waves under the night sky. Hemmett uses colour, texture and drowning walls of sound to give the listener a feeling of nighttime washing over them. “I’ve always had an interest, whether it be in art or movies, in this kind of nocturnal atmosphere.” she says. “This nocturnal feeling with the contrast of light and dark. We wanted it to feel kind of like a soundtrack, so that it feels like a cinematic experience while you’re listening.”

For Hemmett, the journey of songwriting and creation is often long and drawn out, like on the single “Crash,” a heart jumping tale about a car crash that Hemmett was involved in in 2003. “When I was thinking about the accident, there’s a line in the song: ‘Bloodshot dawn, a new beginning.’ I was looking in my notebooks and I finally had written it down in like 2006, and I only had finalized the actual verse to that song more recently, like in the last year or two, so that song has a twenty year period of coming together,” she says.

At other times, her writing can come together quickly and naturally, like on the dancey “Divine,” which pieced itself with one day of vocal recording. “That was quite unusual. To have the lyrics go through no changes and record it all in that one session was a pretty triumphant feeling,” she says.

With the impending release of Ultraviolet, you’d think that Hemmett would take some time for a breather, but even with all of the songs on the album recorded and readied for release, she hasn’t put her legs up to rest quite yet. “I’m collecting all the lyrics into a book for the album release, and it’s gonna be a 50+ page photo book of photography and lyrics, and all the pages are designed by me too,” she says. “I was really inspired by things like Ray Gun magazine, where the type and imagery is a little bit fractured. I wanted to put together a companion piece that would sum up this visual era.”

There’s the old adage that you need to put in 10,000 hours before reaching expertise in any given field – with that kind of dedication to understanding what makes all aspects of her many crafts click together, Hemmett seems to be putting in her 10,000 just about everywhere she can.

Catch LEATHERS at the official release party for Ultraviolet on Aug. 15 at the Fox Cabaret (Vancouver, BC) | TICKETS & INFO