Pointing to a lone picture of Tom Waits hanging above his head, Sebastian briefly explains the plot of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
“The big guy right behind me, he frickin’ is like Dracula’s slave,” he said. “Every time he feeds a big animal to a bigger animal, he gets more evil. I thought that was cool.”
It’s the frontman’s favourite film and the focus of Birdie, the opening track off Mr Industry’s debut EP Dancing To My Own Internal Rhythm. 40 minutes in length across six cacophonous tracks, the quintet whip up an art rock frenzy.
Keep up with the latest music news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
View this post on Instagram
Lachlan, the drummer of the crew, builds on the Dracula analogy.
“It’s the cycle of becoming more evil,” he said. “I guess we loosely tied in the whole ‘growing evil’ thing into like, ‘don’t worry’. Addressing things that you think about while you’re growing up, getting worse without knowing.”
“I feel like [the songs on the EP are] all roughly about change or a fear of changing.”
Referred to by the band as DTMOIR, this exciting collection of tracks has been cooking for quite some time, with aforementioned opener Birdie being conceived midway through 2022. In that three year span, they’ve played alongside acts like Radio Free Alice and The Belair Lip Bombs – but first they had to get out of their hometown, Canberra.
“Because [Canberra is] so small, every band is leaving such an impression on you and everything you hear…there’s like four other bands in the scene, how do we write something that’s not like that?” questioned Lachlan. “Not that there’s not great bands in Canberra obviously, but the frequency of good bands here can be crazy.”
A group of five musos all moving into a sharehouse together in a city where they know no one, held together by a shared dream. It’s a decision Sebastian reflects on as “pretty Canberra-minded”.
“It was hectic. I think Grow Kit, we wrote the first half when we were in Canberra and we had a different backend for it,” he said. “We wrote the second half for it once we were in Melbourne. Looking back at it now, it’s kind of the perfect view of how things went. It was very scary, but I think it’s done good.”
Recorded at Taste Police Studios with the help of Vince McIntyre, DTMOIR sees a band coming of age. From front to back, you can hear a group of musos finding their voice, discovering their sound. Dancing To My Own Internal Rhythm? It’s the band’s new mantra.
“We had a lot of impressions from other bands at the time we were writing,” said Lachlan. “By the time we got into [the EP] the consensus was we’re ready to try something new. It rings true.”
Tracks like Grow Kit and Bagpipes crack on with ferocity, chaotic without ever falling apart. Flickerings of jazz, hard rock and midwest emo are scattered everywhere, held together by a tight rhythm section and an incredible sense of purpose.
“Because we had those songs for so long, it was already like we knew what we wanted to do,” said Sebastian. “We knew what we wanted to do with it from three years of thinking about it.”
The final track, the titular DTMOIR, presents the band as they are in the current day. A slow build to a giant instrumental peak, all while Sebastian’s cryptic lyricism digs into the core theme of the EP; personal growth and change.
“I guess in our own way, being in the band and making music is us trying to work through [change] and figure out ourselves,” said Lachlan. “I think the theme overall is kind of self-discovery, without being corny.”
It’s a powerful closer to an ambitious debut, but according to Sebastian it was nearly scrapped.
“We tried recording it in the first sessions, but the idea just wasn’t fleshed out enough yet,” he said. “We almost dropped it and saved it for whatever the next album was gonna be, but we were like, ‘No, we gotta commit to it. Figure it out’.”
Mr. Industry are set to take over The Evelyn on August 2nd to launch the EP, featuring an all-star lineup of shoegaze icons Camomile, ethereal indie pop singer Flossy and Kaurna/Adelaide-based rockers The Munch. Attendees can expect to hear DTMOIR in full, as well as a few other surprises the band has in store.
“Maybe we’ll bring back a cover of Beauty And The Beat,” said Sebastian. “I’m Nicki Minaj, but I have to have my phone out reading the verse when I do it, which I think adds to it, y’know?”
Mr Industry are playing The Evelyn Hotel on 2 August. Grab tickets here.
