Your new album Youthless was recently released. How is it different from your previous releases?
It’s a more mature album from a songwriting perspective. We’ve all grown up a bit and learnt our instruments better over the years, so we were able to compose some really mature music. Don’t get us wrong, there’s still the childish-toilet-humour-loving side of us that’ll shine through, but [this] is a more mature sound.
How did the idea for the album’s persistent atmosphere of childhood memories come about?
We write all our songs together when we have a jam, and Al [Alastair Thomas, lead vocals and guitar] will generally write the lyrics on the spot too, based on what mood he was [in] that day. [Youth] and coming to terms with the loss of it was on his mind a lot when we were writing this album because every song ended up being based around it. He was feeling very nostalgic when writing the lyrics.
Is there a specific song on the album that stands out to the band?
“Good winter” is our favourite because it’s so different to anything we’ve ever done before.
How has having access to more sophisticated recording and production methods for this album influenced your sound?
We were able to spend a lot of time in pre-production live recording all our ideas, then taking them home and working on them until we were happy, as opposed to the last album where we [went] into [the] studio with a few ideas and hoped for the best. It allowed us to have a more solid idea of what we were putting [on] tape. I think a good sign of growing up is preparation, and we were prepared, so it resulted in [a] mature sound.
Your Oppikoppi 2014 performance was fantastic. Tell us about the videos playing on-screen alongside your performance. Who compiled them and how did they tie into your performance?
What a laugh. Those visuals were actually from a show we did in 2010 at The Bioscope. We had the screen there, so we just made the visuals for a laugh. When Oppi rolled around we figured there’d be a screen, so we might as well utilise it, so Al, who is a video editor by trade, dug out the old project and gave it a little scrub. Each song had visuals that related to it somehow, usually pretty vaguely, but [we] know how it goes at festivals, sometimes you don’t always get the best view of the stage so you end up watching the screen a lot. It was just so the people who didn’t see the stage could still be entertained visually. It also sums up our sense of humour quite well. A few people seemed to be offended.
The clips of band members feeding Kangaroos in the video for “Heaps keen”, the first single from Youthless, are reminiscent of your 2014 Australian tour. How did the Australians receive your crazy stage energy?
It was hit and miss. We tend to draw our energy from the crowd, and that can only happen if there [is] a crowd. So [for] a couple of the shows we played there [was] no one, which is fair enough because no one knows [who] we are in Oz, but then there were great shows [with] The Jungle Giants, who we opened for on their nationwide tour, [where the] crowd was heaving early on and they seemed to really enjoy us. We definitely want to go back as soon as possible to try and develop a solid audience there.
Photo: Hannro Havenga
