There are countless examples of a hyped debut album giving way to a rushed and disappointing follow-up release. Guns N’ Roses’ Lies and Stone Roses’ Second Coming are two key examples.
Then there are the artists who struggled so severely with the weight of anticipation that they went dark for several years. The Blue Nile took five years to follow A Walk Across the Rooftops with Hats. The Avalanches allowed 16 years to pass between their seminal debut, Since I Left You, and its follow-up, Wildflower.
But Newcastle four-piece Rum Jungle are calmly evading either category. The band’s second album, Marginalia, arrives just 16 months after their first, Recency Bias, which debuted at #9 on the ARIA Top 50 Albums Chart – the only Australian album in that week’s top ten.
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It’s a rapid turnaround, especially considering Rum Jungle have been touring non-stop since Recency Bias came out. But for vocalist and guitarist Benny McIntyre, the tidy delivery time is simply a result of the band continuing to do what they love best.
“We weren’t looking too far ahead,” he says, chatting to Beat from his Newcastle home studio. “We were just making sure that we were getting the track laid down in front of us as best we could, but not understanding that it was going to become Marginalia. I was like, ‘Gotta keep writing,’ just because it’s my favourite thing in the world to do.”
Rum Jungle’s music has always been an aggregate of the four members’ varied tastes, which range from contemporary indie rock and post-punk to folk, jazz and star vocalists like Norah Jones.
A couple of years ago, around the time of the Did the Morning Let You Down single, McIntyre told me that Rum Jungle’s sound is essentially the “centre point between four big musical egos that we end up meeting at with every song.”
For Marginalia, the creative brain trust grew to include a couple of outside songwriters: Charlie Hole (aka Thomas Porter) and Pacific Avenue’s Harry O’Brien. “Six or seven of the tracks we wrote with them,” McIntyre says. “That was the first time that any of us had branched off to write with other people.”
They recorded Marginalia with producer Julian Sudek (Royel Otis, Genesis Owusu), who also has a few co-writing credits. The band camped out in Sudek’s Sydney recording studio for the duration of the tracking process.
“We just brought in a bunch of mattresses and then walked 10 meters to the studio every day,” McIntyre says. “They didn’t have a shower so we signed up to the gym that was heaps close by and we just went and showered in the gym with our heads down, hoping nobody realised what we were doing.”
The Marginalia album tour features Rum Jungle’s biggest Australian headline shows to date, including a gig at Northcote Theatre on Saturday 27 June. The band have had an exceptionally busy start to 2026, completing a tour of the UK and Europe in February before heading to Japan in April.
“What I keep saying to the boys is that there’s just something about 2026, this year, for us,” McIntyre says. “It’s a bit of a whirlwind, but we’re super stoked and super grateful that we’re able to go touring. Like, holy shit, we just went to Japan for the first time – first time even going there in general – and we got to play this music that we’ve written in random little rooms in Newcastle and then there we were in the middle of Shibuya, Japan.”
Rum Jungle have a US headline tour locked in for September and October, plus a slot on the Austin City Limits music festival alongside headliners Charlie XCX, The xx and Lorde. They’re looking forward to incorporating a significant chunk of Marginalia into the tour setlist.
“I still remember when we were first playing all the tiny little venues in Newcastle and the fucking local Mayfield skate park and struggling to get a 30-minute set,” McIntyre says. “Now we’re looking down the barrel of an hour-20, hour-30 set or something ridiculous like that and still thinking that we could squeeze more songs in. So it’s definitely feeling pretty good and we’re really excited for the tour.”
Rum Jungle perform at Northcote Theatre on Saturday 27 June.
