If you ask Velvet Trip’s Zeppelin Hamilton how he knows when a song is finished, he’ll probably pause, squint into the distance, and tell you he’s not entirely sure. “Sometimes you just have to let it go. You let the world have it, and see how it feels once it’s no longer just yours.”
That tension between the internal and external, the personal and the performative, sits at the heart of Glimmers, Velvet Trip’s newly released EP. With broad sonic influences ranging from French touch to Australian indie rock, it’s a record born from tiny sparks of honesty, threaded together in loops of glitter and late-night haze. Zeppelin’s voice guides each track with the kind of instinct that can’t be faked and indeed, the tracks on this release have been an exercise in honesty. “I’ve never really sat down to write lyrics,” admits Zeppelin. “It’s always been more like… catching the feeling. I sing nonsense until something sticks. Then I chase that thread.”
When asked to describe Glimmers in one word, Zeppelin pauses shortly before replying:
“Liberating.”
And it is. Glimmers feels like an exhale after a long emotional inhale, the kind of record you write not because you’re chasing a hit but because you need to sort through the noise in your head. “I’ve made a dedication to myself as an artist to constantly challenge myself and not repeat releases,” Zeppelin explains. “The debut album, Harmony Blooms, was escapism, optimism during COVID. But Glimmers is me being more direct. It’s processing, it’s clarity. But I didn’t want it to be negative. I wanted perspective.”
Zeppelin describes the songs on Glimmers as containers of emotion. Little glints of memory caught and crystallised. “It’s like, I can look back and go, ‘Okay, that’s where I was emotionally. That’s what I was dealing with.’ And that becomes a glimmer. A tiny light in a dark space.
Darkness, surprisingly, plays a big part in how Zeppelin envisions the EP. When asked to paint a mental image of the record, he describes it vividly: “The whole canvas is black. Pure black, night-black. And over the top, there are these swirling violet brushstrokes, and little sparkles and shapes placed like constellations. It’s mixed media. It’s chaotic and textured but beautiful. And underneath it all, that darkness holds it together.”
This balance between the emotional heaviness and the sonic lightness is perhaps what makes Glimmers so striking. It’s not weighed down by introspection. Instead, it moves. Tracks pulse and dance with rhythmic confidence, as if grief and joy are just different steps in the same routine.
A big part of that was the collaboration between Zeppelin and his friend Agnostics, whose real name is Toby. “We had this terrible first writing session,” Zeppelin laughs. “Neither of us said it, but it just flopped. Still, we felt like there was something there, so we tried again. And that’s when we wrote ‘It Don’t Matter’, which ended up being the first single from the EP. That one unlocked everything.”
From there, the creative process flowed. With drummer Clay onboard, the trio played and co-produced the entire EP, working in bursts of inspiration and slow refinements. Their method of writing lyrics stayed the same: adlibbing over a beat until a word or phrase sticks, then using that to shape the story. “Honestly, I don’t usually know what I’m singing about until the song is finished” says Zeppelin. “Sometimes not even until it’s released.”
Still, the emotional throughline is clear. On Glimmers, Zeppelin reflects on old friendships and new distance, lingering memories, and the quiet ache of moving on. “There’s a line in ‘It Don’t Matter’ that goes, ‘Like a shadow in my mind/ like a ghost from a past life’ that’s kind of a secret. It’s not a diss, exactly, but there’s shade. My version of shade, anyway.”
There’s also deep tenderness, especially on ‘The Here and Now’, a track inspired by time Zeppelin spent with his young nephew. “It was the one song I really fought to include. Not because I thought it would be a hit, but because it means something to me. I wrote it for him. And I wanted to honour that.”
Even the tools used to create Glimmers came with unexpected meaning. Zeppelin tells me, grinning, about a ridiculous guitar pedal called the Rubber Chicken. “Toby kept pushing me to use it. I thought it was a joke at first, but then we used it everywhere. Now it’s literally the sound of the EP.”
Beyond the music, Zeppelin’s vision is expanding. He’s thinking about Velvet Trip as more than a band. It’s becoming a multidimensional world. Aesthetic. Performance. Identity. Expression. “I’ve been thinking about Bowie a lot,” he says. “How he embodied his art. The way the visuals, the character, the music—it was all part of the same language. That’s what I want. I want to keep pushing this into something bigger, something that lives beyond the songs.”
That expansion is already underway. A recent photo shoot with artist Macami resulted in the EP’s visual campaign – one that blends glam surrealism with character-driven styling. “I used to model,” Zeppelin admits, a little sheepishly. “I hated it, mostly. But the creative side of it, the costumes, the roleplay… I loved that. So when we planned the shoot, I wanted it to feel like a character stepping into their own mythology. Macami totally got it.”
As the EP’s release day arrives, Zeppelin isn’t thinking about outcomes. No lofty ambitions, no big proclamations. “I just want to write better songs,” he says. “To know myself better. To go deeper. That’s it.
And maybe that’s why Glimmers feels so quietly revolutionary. It doesn’t shout. It shimmers. It pulses. Taking your hand and walking you through the dark, pointing out each tiny glint of light along the way.
