The title of Kingswood’s latest record, After Hours, Close to Dawn, is an ode to the colossal amount of late-nights-turned-early-mornings that were spent on it. Throughout 2016, the Kingswood guys divvied their time between New York, Nashville and Melbourne, all the while piecing together their sophomore full-length release. Lead vocalist Fergus Linacre and lead guitarist and vocalist Alex Laska explain they did most of their best creative work during the earliest hours of the morning.
“The title of the album really is the summary of everything it’s about. Those hours were a time where I did a lot of thinking and collected my thoughts about what I was doing at the time, so it just felt really appropriate to use as a title,” says Laska.
“There’s a key lyric in one of the singles, in the bridge of ‘Creepin’ and it goes ‘Do you go to sleep or be reborn?’ and in a way, that’s really a summary of the experience of this album for us. We found that a lot of our best creative thought was happening during these mid-morning hours.”
After Hours, Close to Dawn is a record that Laska and Linacre are immensely proud of. It’s a deeply personal, self-reflective and honest piece of work they agree was conceived very authentically – it’s a product of who they are as people.
Linacre explains that there was a particular experience that has stuck with him from his time spent on the record. Although Laska does most of the songwriting, Linacre had a hand in writing a couple of the tracks on the album, with none closer to his heart than ‘Atmosphere’ which was extremely cathartic for him to write.
“Ten years ago my brother passed away and since then I’ve never been able to write about it, either I’ve not felt like doing it or it’s just not come out,” he explains. “But then we had our last day in the studio and we were doing the song ‘Atmosphere’ and we needed to get it done quickly, so I was given the task of writing the lyrics and I found that under pressure I was finally able to come out with a song about losing my brother, which was really good for me to get off my chest.”
Reviews have touted the sound of this record as dynamic and experimental, which the boys explain has a lot to do with Kingswood’s dedication to being different. Not ones to care about what anybody thinks, they make a conscious effort to debunk any conventions of making a record.
“I think a lot of different people who were in our position when we were making this record probably would have changed how we did it because it would have been more conventional, it might have been played on the radio more. People tell us this stuff and we literally don’t care because we just want to make the music that we love,” says Linacre.
“It’s almost a deliberate thing in the back of our minds where we think ‘how bold can we be?’ or ‘how can we shock people the most?’ We actually really thrive when people tell us that what we’re doing might not go well or we might freak people out.”
Kingswood are also completely obsessed with being on the road, and are currently taking this album on another spin across Australia. Although it’s the second run for After Hours, Close to Dawn in just a short while, Laska explains that the guys get pretty antsy when they aren’t playing shows, and will take any chance to do so.
This tour sees Kingswood hitting up major capital city hotspots, as well as a slew of those often-forgotten regional dots on the map. In fact, the main focus of this particular tour is getting around to as many of those destinations as possible, so the likes of central Victoria, the CentralCoast and Far North Queensland can all expect some Kingswood action.
“We’ve made some lifelong fans doing that sort of thing, I remember the first time we played Wagga Wagga and it was to about eight people, and now we’ll play Wagga and sell out a 500 capacity venue, which is really awesome because it shows that people do appreciate you making the effort to come to those places,” says Laska.
Linacre adds that while it’s definitely a thrill to play in big city venues, Kingswood are huge fans of the vibe that regional punters bring to their gigs.
“When you play in big cities, I mean they’re great big shows, but the people at the gig might have seen another band last week or the night before because we’re so spoiled for choice in the big cities,” he explains. “But in regional spots, it’s such a big event and the whole town gets into it. There’s always a party afterwards, you feel much closer with the punters and the vibe is far more intimate, so we absolutely love it.”
A couple of shows from the tour have already taken place and Linacre reckons it’s been all kinds of rewarding to see how After Hours, Close to Dawn has connected with listeners, sharing that the boys are stoked with the reaction from punters.
“You don’t really know how a record is connecting with people until you play it in front of them and hear them sing the songs back to you,” he says. “I mean you can look at Spotify numbers and sales and things, but it doesn’t really tell you whether people are loving songs, so to hear people singing back – even the verses of songs that weren’t singles – has been such a nice feeling.”
