An Honest Mistake’s New Single Still Has More Surprises Coming Your Way

About a year ago, Malaysian pop punk band An Honest Mistake started writing what is now their single known as IDGAD. It was their first original track since 2016 but much to our surprise, Darren Teh (lead vocals/guitar) tells us it happened by accident at one of their rehearsals.

“We’ve been talking about writing new material and during one of the writing sessions, Sonny, our bassist, blurted out ‘You don’t give a f*** about me’. It was strong. The melody felt right. But to make it all PG for everyone, we changed it to ‘I don’t give a damn about you’ instead taking a more empowering role as compared to a pessimistic one” shares Darren.

The band quickly got to work and started recording towards the end of February this year and well, no points for guessing what went down and in turn, messed up that one last session before the mixing process could begin. Thanks, Covid.

“Our last recording session at the studio was on 17th March” says Darren. “Initially, we thought, ‘Ok let’s wait for two weeks then we can head back to complete the rest of it’ but the two weeks turned to four and then that became months. So, I decided to record the final bits of vocals at home and sent it back to the studio. I recorded 20 layers of my voice in different varieties to simulate a crowd.”

When May kicked in, things were being finalized and they eventually released the original track in June 2020. The meaning of the song is rather clear (do give it a listen below if you haven’t already and if you have, just listen to it again) but there was something else that added on to the single’s whole unplanned-ness.

Darren recently told us that there’s going to be three remixes for IDGAD. “I had written about 10 demos. While sharing it with the band at home after not meeting since the lockdown, Ian, our drummer suggested we should have a DJ scratch while listening to one of the demos. It was a light bulb moment for me and I told the guys that I’ll get in touch with the DJ friend that we all knew. It started from there. Once I had gotten in touch with him, he started working on it. I ended up making an 80’s version of it myself too taking inspiration by some of the 80’s remixes of current pop songs.”

The first remix which was just recently released is produced by Karazey, a self-taught 17 year old producer from Kajang who Darren discovered through Spotify.

“I usually do that every Friday since they’ve got the New Music Friday Malaysia playlist out then. It’s usually jumbled up with Korean, Singaporean, Indonesian, Japanese, Taiwanese and other international acts. I went through each of them and found Karazey. I hit him up on Instagram and I also got him on my show on AFORADIO. He asked for my vocal stems and within a day, he sent back a draft. As it was, it sounded good already and within two weeks, it was finalized and done. I also found out that he lives in the opposite ‘taman’ from my family’s house in Kajang. He’s also 17 years old, still in school and sitting for his exams. What a talented guy!” You can check out some of his stuff on Spotify below:

This really cool idea not only acts as an extension of the promotion of the single but at the same time, is pretty much a standalone project on its own. If the original wasn’t your cuppa teh tarik, here, nah, have it in 3 different genres. But beyond that, Darren tells us it’s also to highlight the collaborators. “We’ve always been big on promoting fellow artists so this is one of our efforts in continuing that. We put out a remix album of 16 tracks featuring local and regional producers in 2017. All of which has always been to support and push these great talents.”

A pretty darn cool idea and if you’re as psyched as we are about the two other surprises coming our way, follow An Honest Mistake on Facebook and Instagram for updates.

Know of some other really awesome songs and/or collaborations? Hit us up!