“We did it all at home,” explains Higgins. “We built a studio in Terry’s garage in Mount Dandenong. He was on drums and vocals, and I was playing guitar and keyboards. I had a lot of recording gear from being in other bands, so between us we had a whole studio’s worth of equipment.”
“Before recording the album, we hadn’t really done much. We both had young families and had hit a stage in our lives where our music had been pushed to the background.We were both still writing a lot of songs, so the album was really just an avenue to get these piles of songs that we had out of our heads.”
The process started back in 2011, with the pair initially intending to put together an EP.
“It’s been a while coming,” explains Higgins. “We finished the record close to a year ago and started recording three years before that. We’d get together once a fortnight or once a month, whenever we could. We thought we’d put out an EP and had half a dozen songs mixed, but we ended up scrapping most of those. From that, we decided that we’d knuckle down and try to record a whole album.”
After a three-year recording process, Higgins and Gardiner were left with the task of putting together a live band. The duo were joined by fellow Mount Dandenong local Phil Moyes on drums, and two of Higgins’ former bandmates – keyboardist/guitarist Paul Oswald and Tristan Querol on guitar. The recent addition of Hauke Ahrens on bass has seen the band jump in size to a six piece.
“We’ve spent the last six to 12 months getting a band together, playing gigs, and working out how to best put the album out. I think the next few gigs will be really special – we’ve been working really hard with the new members of the band. It feels like things are just taking off for us.”
The album comes from a range of influences, from Britpop to classic rock. It even features guest vocals from Dallas Crane’s Dave Larkin, who lives around the corner from the founding members.The band have been categorised as everything from psychedelic rock to ‘70s soul rockers, but Higgins prefers a different label.
“I call it space country,” he laughs. “That to me evokes some of our influences that haven’t been referenced so much, like Neil Young and Ryan Adams, combined with more synth-based stuff like Brian Eno and Roxy Music.”
The band’s influences stretch further than just the musical sphere, sharing a name with a certain fictional family from Winterfell.
“Yeah the name comes from Game of Thrones,” laughs Higgins. “When we were finishing the record, we thought ‘oh we better get some photos done’. Terry’s wife made these awesome jackets – they were these wolf-like jackets, and we went out and took photos up at the Mount Dandenong lookout, overlooking the setting sun and the city. It was way too Game of Thrones –completely unintentional – but we literally looked like we’d just come out of the northern winter.”
The album was released, quite fittingly, on Monday April 13 – the same day as the Game of Thrones season five premiere. “Again, completely unintentional,” laughs Higgins. “Hopefully we got mixed up in a few search terms.”
BY KELSEY BERRY
