MANY might remember The Impatient Sisters appearing as mermaids in the band’s whimsical music video for its 2014 song Hey There Young Sailor.
Three sisters – Soraya, Nazeera, and Ireena Taib – make up the unsigned indie band from Kuantan, which has racked up over 1.6 million streams on Spotify, with Hey There Young Sailor recorded as its number one song to date.
The song’s music video, directed by Ling Low with visual art by Lyn Ong, also won the artistic award at the 2016 British Library Labs Symposium for using digital collections from the British Library archives.
Other dreamy tracks from its self-titled 2014 album, like Oh Kawan, The Ark, and Comet and Stars, have kept fans mesmerised, along with its 2018 single Hanyut.
Back this year with new single Hopeless, The Impatient Sisters are looking forward to bringing its romance-tinged songs to this year’s Good Vibes Festival taking place at The Ranch at Gohtong Jaya, on July 20 and 21.
“I guess we’ve grown up in terms of life experiences, and the story that we want to tell through our music is also different,” said Soraya in a recent interview with the band.
She added: “With Hopeless, it’s still somewhat the same vibe for us, it’s still what we like to write about, and it’s still quite mellow.
“We always gravitate towards that. We’re still the same, just older,” she said, with younger sisters Nazeera and Ireena chiming in to agree.
The Impatient Sisters, who write and compose their own music together, will also be playing unreleased new tracks at the festival.
One hallmark of a fun show for a performer is when the crowd sings along. It is no different for The Impatient Sisters, whose fans seem to memorise their songs.
“You can see them [singing] along, which is nice,” said Nazeera, a trained pastry chef by day.
“It’s a nice feeling,” added Ireena, “when people sing back your lyrics.”
According to Soraya, what makes the songs “very special” to fans is how the lyrics are meaningful in their own different way.
Soraya explained: “Because when we write it, it’s ours, but when we release it, you know it’s yours.”
Nazeera added: “It’s like we grew together with the song, kind of. It’s nice to see them [sing along].”
A lot of fans particularly enjoy The Ark because “there’s a kazoo in it,” said Nazeera, adding with a laugh: “Every time [Ireena] plays the kazoo, everyone gets excited.”
Hopeless took about two years for the band to work on, since youngest sister Ireena was studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts back when the sisters first wrote the lyrics in 2017.
Travelling back and forth for her studies, the three members wrote the genesis of the song during one of Ireena’s visits back home.
Full-time musician Ireena, who considers herself a guitarist, said: “I went away again, and then came back, and [said] ‘oh, remember we have this song?’”
The sisters typically write about “what we see, what we observe,” and Hopeless was a song they wanted to make “as heartbreaking as possible,” to complement the sweet guitar riffs.
Soraya said: “We like country music, and we like folk music, and how that kind of music is always very intimate, and very personal.
“I guess with that, we started writing Hopeless, and we didn’t know where it was going to go. It was a very long process of how sometimes you’re together, you break up, and then, it’s just really sad.
As she puts it: “I guess people relate to all these heartbreaking songs ‘cause people go through heartbreak.”
