D’Arcy’s involvement extended to advice on how to manage things outside of the studio, and Soltys’ affectionate admiration flows easily. “We prepped really hard. Matt said, ‘You guys are here, but you could be here. Do your practise, do your rehearsals, get all the right gear, and let’s make something special.’ He was definitely proactive in the way we went about it; he came to our rehearsals. It’s the best thing we’ve ever done. We’re rapt with it.”
Soltys is speaking about the four-piece’s second release entitled Antihero, which follows their 2010 debut Stay Where We Lay. The first record did well, but didn’t make as large an impact as the boys would have liked. “It didn’t really launch us,” Soltys explains. “There was always this kind of underlying disappointment, which we never really speak of, but I know we were all disheartened by it. It was this massive 12 track album and we did three weeks of work. But it’s the best way to get your confidence up.” The decision to get together and record again came nimbly. “A few months after doing [recently released single] Circles I was just lying in bed and was feeling really impulsive, and we had all these songs piling up. So I texted all the guys and said, ‘Let’s do a four track EP.’ It wasn’t really a question or a request,” he laughs. “It’s 2012 in the music industry: you’ve got to keep rolling, you can’t [become] stagnant for two seconds or else you’re going to get left behind I think.”
Circles came about when D’Arcy contacted the band after Stay Where We Lay was released. “All this time later we went and did Circles with Matt because he was kind enough to ask us back. He said, ‘Guys, come and do a session free of charge, I’m getting some really good sounds’ and he wanted to [share them] with us.”
The track will not be on Antihero, as it was a discrete undertaking. “It was almost like a precursor to the EP,” says Soltys thoughtfully. “We’re going to release it soon, we’re leaning towards a free download. We didn’t put it on the EP because they were two different sessions. They both sounded great, but [Circles] just didn’t fit on the Antihero sessions. But we like it as its own little thing.”
The band are kind of jazzed to launch the album at The Corner, as the venue has been something of a backdrop for their formative years investigating the music landscape. “This is such a big deal,” Soltys says warmly. “When I was 16, me and [bassist] Scott used to go with a bunch of mates. We saw a big lineup one day there at an underage gig, like One Dollar Short and [so on]. We saw Unwritten Law another time. This is back when moshing was allowed. It’s just a great venue. Since then I’ve seen so many acts. I saw Mutemath a few months ago,” he says and we have a shared spouting of admiration for the New Orleans rockers. “In my opinion, Mutemath’s Odd Soul is the best album of 2011, hands down. So eclectic, those guys. They put in 100 per cent, you’ve got to respect that.”
While discussing The Corner it occurs to me that there is a bar very close to the venue on Swan Street, named Holliava. “Yeah,” Soltys laughs. “One night I caught a train from the Caulfield Cup and I was going to meet my brother at The Corner Hotel, [he] was seeing Gyroscope. And I thought, ‘I’m just going to wing it, I’m going to go to Richmond and buy a ticket’.” Unfortunately the gig was sold-out and the villainous doormen wouldn’t let young Soltys in. “So I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to go and kill time at Holliava down the road’. So I kind of sat there in my suit, in a booth, drinking pint after pint. And I felt the need to write a bunch of lyrics, or kind of document what I was seeing at the time. I used those exact lyrics for a song called Holliava.”
After this the group decided to lift their collective title from the song, and the band was born. Soltys thought it might be strange for listeners, knowing that the band comes from Melbourne, to understand that the bar does have a place in their story. But eventually he came to terms with it, just by looking around and taking notes from the big guns. “Greenday got their name from a pub in their hometown,” laughs Soltys, “so that’s me justifying it.”
BY ZOË RADAS
