Jack Summers is not one for nostalgia. “I like the present,” says the 27-year-old singer and guitarist for Melbourne punk band CLAMM. “I don’t want to go back.”
CLAMM’s new album, Serious Acts, is their third in five years. Summers started the band with his high school friend, drummer Miles Harding, close to a decade ago. They wrote and recorded their first album, Beseech Me, when they were in their early twenties. In Summers’ recollection, they didn’t really know what they were doing.
“We were kind of going out on a limb and there was not much thought put into it,” he says.
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Bass player Stella Rennex joined CLAMM in 2023 following the departure of Maisie Everett, who now fronts indie pop outfit The Belair Lips Bombs. Serious Acts is the first album made by this incarnation of CLAMM, and it’s their most ambitious to date.
“For this record, we mainly wrote everything together in the room,” Summers says. “Or if I had a demo, we just expanded upon the demo in a small rehearsal room. And that togetherness I think is important.”
The album begins with And I Try, which contains a gnarled synth loop that’s more EBM than punk rock. “We’re a punk band but we listen to all kinds of music,” Summers says. “I bought this old synth in Japan years and years ago and I was writing demos and messing around with it.”
And I Try is one of two songs to feature this synth, an Arturia MicroFreak. The other is the album’s almost-title track and emotional centrepiece, More Serious Acts.
“It’s this angry little bastard,” Summers says of the MicroFreak. “Everything that happens with it is angry. I don’t even know what the knobs and shit do, but I just fuck around.”
At seven minutes, More Serious Acts is the longest song in CLAMM’s repertoire. It’s also an example of how the band’s songwriting has evolved. The song is built around a dark, heavy bass groove, which is doubled on the MicroFreak.
“Some of the songs are more ambitious,” Summer agrees. “But we feel really good in that space, I think. We keep making songs that come really naturally to us but feel really good to us as well.”
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Elsewhere, Serious Acts doesn’t sound vastly different to Beseech Me or its 2022 follow-up, Care. But Summers believes the album’s two synth-heavy songs “will wind up being important markers for more change after this album.”
Serious Acts was recorded by engineer Nao Anzai, who also worked on CLAMM’s first two albums. The sound is loud and often intense, but not slick or artificially heavy. “We wanted to make it as big as possible,” Summer says.
He continues: “We wanted to reflect the live stuff as much as possible. But I also think we wanted to cut back any of the excess sounds that were going on. So, like, the vocals are pretty dry compared to our other stuff. There’s not heaps of sounds, but we just wanted the sounds that are there to sound really big and kind of overwhelming, as they do in the live space.”
CLAMM are in their element in the live environment. They just completed their fifth tour of Europe, and they’ll take Serious Acts on tour around Australia in August and September.
“It’s really great, we love it,” Summers says of life on the road. “The crowds are like-minded people. There’s all sorts of people but it’s quite often like-minded people who are concerned about the same things, about the state of the world. We get to share that experience with people and have a real connection with people in most places we go.”
For Summers, experiencing and facilitating these connections is what gives him the motivation to keep going, even when the financial rewards are scarce. “We work really hard,” he says. “It’s like a job. We spend hours and hours every week, and with nothing really to show for it financially.”
But, he adds, “The thing that fuels me as an artist to keep doing it is the fact that people are resonating with the message and sharing in the frustration. When [a song is] about something that you care about and you’re with people that care the same or feel the same, that’s magic.”
CLAMM’s new album Serious Acts is out now. Tour dates are here.
