Descending from traditional Greek music greatness, the Xylouris siblings bulldoze their own path with Frenzee.
On their debut album, What’s Wrong With Me, Greek and Australian cultures merge to form blistering, politically charged punk. The band will return to Australia to perform the album for the first time since its release in December.
Cretan morning light streams through a window onto the backs of Apollonia, Adonis and Nikos as they join the video call. All three were born in Australia but moved back to Crete with their parents as children. The siblings studied in Australia and the travel back and forth has maintained their Australian accent.
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“We’ve been playing instruments forever… since we were five or six. With Dad and Mum being musicians, instruments were around the house all the time,” says Nikos. “I think we started jamming together since about then,” adds Adonis.
In Frenzee, Adonis plays the guitar and Nikos drums, but both are skilled at traditional Greek instruments. Following in the footsteps of his famed grandfather Antonis, Nikos plays the lyra – a bowed, fiddle-like instrument that also requires finger plucking. Like his father George, Andonis plays the lauto – a four-stringed Cretan lute.
George also bends the rules of tradition playing in Xylouris White with legendary drummer Jim White. The sibling’s father and grandfather only represent a portion of influential Greek musicians in their family tree.
Their mother, Shelagh Hannan, was a staple in the Melbourne music scene in the ’90s. Paying homage to their Irish background, she and her sisters played in the folk band Friends and Relations and rock band The Troubles.
Along with the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, Shelagh’s music taste heavily influenced the three growing up. “We loved that kind of music because Mum listened to a lot of it,” recalls Apollonia. “Mum bought us a lot of good CDs: AC/DC, Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, Motorhead… for birthdays and Christmas,” adds Adonis.
It wasn’t until the pandemic disrupted the boy’s busy touring schedule and allowed Frenzee to begin in 2021. “We always loved playing or writing just guitar stuff and lyrics. We never put it together because me and Adonis were running around playing a lot of Greek shows,” explains Nikos. “When we were locked down, we were all together and had a chance to share a couple of ideas and then record the EP.”
The writing process is shared, usually with Apollonia writing the lyrics and the boys writing the music. “There are songs that I’ve written, there are songs that Nick’s written, and then there’s a lot that are fifty-fifty. I’ve got a riff…” says Adonis.
“…We don’t know what to do with, then I’ve got a riff we don’t know what to do with,” continues Nikos. “And we just put them one after the other, and they work,” says Adonis, seemingly like their sentences.
Apollonia lives down the street from the boys in Heraklion, Crete’s capital, simplifying the writing process. “The boys go up there, and they’ll be like ‘listen to this,’ and I’ll record it on my phone. Then I’ll come here and listen to it and write,” she says. “Then she’ll come back in two hours and we’ll have a different version,” jokes Adonis.
Apollonia’s vocals are delivered with an unapologetic Australian accent, only adding to the band’s bite. Her lyrics are “mostly shit that I’m angry about,” she says. “Being where we are, it can be a lot harder for Appy to…” says Adonis. “…Grow up as she feels free to move how she wants because she’s a girl,” continues Nikos. “Appy comes over pissed off one day, and she spills her guts out about something that happened, and then the next day we’ll have a song.”
“Apart from growing up in Crete, which is really patriarchal, we’re in Greece. The government’s fucked, the police are so corrupt, so there’s so much shit to talk about,” says Apollonia. “When you go out and see your mates, that’s what everyone talks about, so you get a lot of influence from that,” adds Nikos.
Debuting Frenzee to Greek audiences “raised a few eyebrows,” says Adonis, as all three laugh. As the boys have built a following playing traditional music for the past decade, along with the Xylouris name, expectations were there to be broken. “People had no idea that we even played that music that music,” says Apollonia.
They didn’t know what to expect when playing a festival in their home village. “It wasn’t the same as playing any other gig, because these people had watched us grow up in the trad scene. But even older people were loving it,” says Nikos. “It was very supportive, from people you wouldn’t expect,” adds Apollonia. “All these traditional shepherd people were like ‘this really suits you guys.’”
Self-produced, What’s Wrong With Me was recorded over a week at a friend’s studio in Athens. While all they know is playing with family, Nikos says it has advantages. “It’s easy to not worry when it comes to being creative, or recording stuff, or writing stuff. Because we’re siblings, it’s easy to say, “Nah fuck that, it’s shit, change that, do something else,’ and no one gets offended,” he says. “Speak for yourself,” jokes Apollonia.
FRENZEE What’s Wrong With Me Australian Tour
- 4 Dec – Collingwood Crawl, Always Live
- 6 Dec – Meredith Music Festival
- 11 Dec – RRR Performance Space
- 12 Dec – The Espy Basement, St Kilda
- 13 Dec – Howler
- 15 Dec – Poison City End of Year Boogie, The Tote
- 19 Dec – The Espy Basement
- 20 Dec – The Eastern, Ballarat
- 21 Dec – The Last Chance Rock & Roll Bar
- 27 Dec – Beechworth, Tanswells Hotel
- 31 Dec – The Old Bar
- 3 Jan – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
- 4 Jan – The Gasometer
- 10 Jan – Nightjar Festival, Torquay
- 31 Jan – La La La’s, Wollongong
- 1 Feb – The Enmore Hotel, Sydney
- 7 Feb – The Bearded Lady, Brisbane
- 9 Feb – Vinnies Dive, Gold Coast
- 14 Feb – The Petersham Bowling Club, NSW
- 1 Mar – Flippin’ the Bird Festival, Frankston
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