The lineup was fucking amazing, too. Usually, we feel like the real outliers at festivals like this – it’s a lot of electronic acts and then us and maybe two other token guitar bands. This time around, there were acts like DIIV, Metz, The Smith Street Band – who we’ve toured with – and Courtney Barnett did the New Zealand one, too. We got along really well with everyone, just talking gear and hanging out. It really is the best festival in Australia. We played it back when we started out, just some scruffy kids from Brisbane, and they gave us a chance when no one else would. It was an honour to be asked back.”
This month will see the release of Waco, Violent Soho’s third album (or fourth, if you count We Don’t Belong Here, most of which was re-recorded for their self-titled album). It follows 2013’s Hungry Ghost, which saw them crack the ARIA charts, sell out national tours, and become potentially the biggest name in contemporary Australian rock. For a band that existed on the fringe for nearly a decade, it was a big payoff, and songs from that album, such as Covered in Chrome and In the Aisle, have remained rock radio staples since their release. When it came to Waco, the elephant in the room had to be acknowledged – just how do you follow up one of the biggest Australian rock records of the 2010s?
“I was so confident,” says Boerdam. “I thought that I’d be able to finish writing for the album in four months. When that was up, I realised that I had two songs – and I wasn’t confident enough in either to show to the rest of the band. I remembered Hungry Ghost took three years to write, and I decided to start fresh. I guess what I’ve found is that I never make a single song in the one go. I’m always scraping together bits from three or four different ideas. I tend to work in fragments – a riff here, a sound idea here, some lyrics there. You mix and match, you collate until you have something cohesive. It’s about the gut feeling, really. It’s about knowing what direction you want the songs to take. We got stuck into it every day and we came out of the process with something we were really happy with.”
Waco was recorded throughout 2015 at The Shed in Brisbane by Bryce Moorhead, a long time friend of the band who has worked on several of their past releases. Mixing and mastering was completed in Moorhead’s basement, and the end result somewhat diverges from the mane-thrashing, abrasive alt-rock Violent Soho have become renowned for over the last decade.
“I guess the foundation of this band is those three-chord/four-chord heavy pop songs,” says Boerdam. “We wanted to see what would happen if we explored away from that.
“There’s a bit of that on Hungry Ghost, definitely. A song like OK Cathedral was a really different experience for us, doing something so quiet and then so weird and jammy. It’s a much bigger part of Waco, though. I’d like to think what separates Violent Soho from being a straight-up punk band or a straight-up grunge band or whatever is our willingness to explore what we can do on a higher level – building up these big, layering guitars and having these spiralling, revolving riffs that expand out into something new entirely. Every time we try out something new in the band, we just hope that the people that have followed along with us for a long time are able to kind of go along with where we want to take them, and us, next.”
The band are set to tour Waco throughout May. While their last national headline tour – the No Sleep ‘Til Mansfield tour – was their biggest in terms of length, the Waco tour is easily their biggest in terms of venue capacity. Along with long-time friends DZ Deathrays and Dune Rats, the band will take on theatres in most major capital cities, with many shows already sold out and additional dates added. Soho also hope to get back to the States this year – a place where they once floundered, they now hope to thrive.
“There’s stuff coming in and out of my calendar every day,” laughs Boerdam. “It’s going to be a pretty massive year – I mean, it already has been, and we’re not even halfway.”
BY BEL RYAN
