Naarm / Melbourne-based indie duo Skydeck have released their anticipated sophomore album Coupon, available now on limited-edition 12" vinyl and digitally via Dinosaur City Records, Osborne Again and Kingfisher Bluez.

Skydeck is the project of Mitchum Clemens (Ciggie Witch) and Dom Kearton, joined live by Liam Parsons (Good Morning), Dainis Lacey and Ambrin Hasnain (Cool Sounds). Taking inspiration from cold, post-punk sounds of the 1980s, the band makes use of FM synthesis and the bright, clean and sometimes artificial sounds it provides, contrasted with distorted guitars, motorik drums and upbeat basslines.

Coupon, the follow-up to 2019’s Australian Music Prize-nominated Eureka Moment, was written and recorded in early 2020, with the duo physically separated throughout the entire process: one in Mexico, the other back home in Australia. Writing the album was as much an artistic endeavour as it was a way to stay connected with each other over long distances, with songs and ideas acting like letters back and forth via countless email exchanges and phone memos.

While Eureka Moment gestured towards an anti-capitalist sentiment, Coupon sees the band less focused on observing society's issues from afar, rather reflecting on their own involvement within them.

The etymology of the word coupon can be read as ‘something that helps you cope’, a fitting title for music made by two friends trying to stay connected and make sense of their place in the world together.

Coupon is out now via Dinosaur City Records, Osborne Again and Kingfisher Bluez.

Release: August 27th, 2021, Dinosaur City Records/Osborne Again/Kingfisher Bluez.
Words: Dinosaur City Records

Snowy Band have shared their highly anticipated sophomore album Alternate Endings, out now digitally and on limited edition vinyl via Spunk Records.
Alternate Endings is the follow up release to Snowy Band's 2020 debut album Audio Commentary, which received seemingly endless praise across the board nationwide.
While some artists find it challenging to live up to debut release success, on Alternate Endings, Liam 'Snowy' Halliwell doesn't try to make something more grandiose, instead he describes setting out to write the same album again. Liam says: "Alternate Endings ended up being a semi-sequel or a re-boot of Audio Commentary – an alternate version. It has track listing, artwork and instrumentation that’s deliberately a mirror image of the original. It was recorded the same way and it even has some of the same songs on it!" 
While this is true, with a band line-up featuring some of Melbourne's best and brightest talents, Snowy Band's Alternate Endings have delivered a sequel of sorts that shines just as brightly as the original.
Swaying between dream-pop numbers that will have you joyfully singing along, to finger-picking tracks that lull and sooth on even the darkest day, Alternate Endings is just that - a personal alternate ending. Just close your eyes and be taken there.
Snowy Band is the primary musical project of Melbourne-based musician and songwriter Liam Halliwell (formerly of The Ocean Party and countless other Australian groups over the past decade).
Formed in 2019 with long-time friends and collaborators Emma Russack, Nathalie Pavlovic and Dylan Young, Snowy Band worked quickly and consistently throughout their first year in existence - writing, recording and playing their first shows – culminating in the release of their debut LP Audio Commentary in 2020.
Alternate Endings is the band's sophomore album, out digitally and on limited edition vinyl via Spunk Records. 

Release: August 27th, 2021, Spunk Records
​Words: Brain Drain PR

It was the silence as much as the disease that proved so unsettling. The world had gone inside, underground, taking with it some of its more destructive aspects. The clean and clear air in major cities was a jarring reminder of the airborne rot we had grown used to. Stuck
indoors, we went stir crazy, imagined new worlds, dystopian worlds, apocalypses of the small and large variety. There were viral social media stories, most of them fake, about animals reoccupying cities, dolphins taking back the canals of Venice, elephants getting
drunk in abandoned Chinese corn wine distilleries and passing out in tea gardens. In those first fearful days of the pandemic, we wrote ourselves out of existence and imagined what the world would be like without us. We missed the noise; we carried it inside us. We tried to
find melody in the madness.

Most of us have lived some inner Tropical Fuck Storm over this past year and a half. Gareth Liddiard, frontman for the Aussie band with a name perfectly suited to the times, was like the rest of us in feeling the malaise. On not writing any new songs for the first six
months of the global shutdown, he says, “Why would I? Everything seemed pointless.” Even for a band that’s made a career out of crafting songs attuned to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air, what the band calls “give-a-fuck fatigue.”

A Laughing Death in Meatspace and Braindrops, Tropical Fuck Storm’s 2018 and 2019 records, probed the destructive force of consumerist culture, the imperialistic reaches of the United States, the threat posed by a warming planet. The band wedded a brave new
worldview to an ever lively acid punk sound. Which made you sometimes despair. While still wanting to dance.
Their third LP, Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of contemporary panic. Over the last five years, you didn’t have to be conspiratorial to see the conspiracies everywhere you turned; and Liddiard,

Fiona Kitschin, Erica Dunn, and Lauren Hammel, the Tropical Fuck Storm collective, know how to make friends with the strange. They invite our paranoia and fatigue. “It’s a permanent state,” Liddiard sings, “war made the State, the State made war, what’s the point
of worrying ’bout it anymore?” The band chronicles weird adventures in statecraft and surveillance, ponders the global infatuation with resurgent fascisms. Tropical Fuck Storm shines an incandescent light on a world in which corporate media, bad-faith leaders, and charismatics of all stripes lose the ability to recognize their own deceptiveness.

At times we’re tempted to call Deep States a protest album, though it’s not, quite. The band is far too wary of the self-importance attached to songs in the didactic mode. “We make pop records,” Liddiard says, “that don’t deny we’re all in a bit of trouble here.” But Tropical Fuck Storm does their preaching on the sly, always cognizant of the fact they are making pop music, after all, no matter how avant-garde or “out there” it gets. 

For us, what makes Tropical Fuck Storm so great is the intersection between their dark but satiric storytelling and musical arrangements intent on perverting received canons and wisdoms. Entering into a Tropical Fuck Storm song is like arriving late to a live show where
everybody’s grooving and too far gone to notice you. Even though the track has already been cut, you feel as though the band’s still improvising, making it all up as you listen. These are songs as experiments, advancing and retreating at their own idiosyncratic, deeply
unsettling pace. They hang on the slant beat and slide into jazzy, distortion-packed jams so tumultuous they’d make Charlie Mingus proud.
Musically, Deep States goes wherever it wants, riffing on pop, R&B, Talking Heads-style new wave, Delta blues, Tom Waits, and some of the band’s hip-hop favourites such as Wu-Tang Clan and Missy Elliot. Barriers aren’t just broken, they seem to have completely fallen
away.

As we write this, parts of the world are opening up, or trying to. But Tropical Fuck Storm is here to remind us that many of our most urgent political and social problems have been around a long time now. Same as it ever was, as another genre bending band once sang. As the signs of the latest crisis subside, and the dull ache of awareness with it, Deep States will be here to remind us that there is no foreseeable end to human folly, nor, fortunately, to the creativity that resists it. Over the past few years, we’ve all heard the noise in our own heads. Tropical Fuck Storm has made music of it.

Written by:
R. Clifton Spargo & Anne K. Ream

Release: August 20, 2021, TFS Record

'Husk' is the second album from Launceston blues duo Guthrie.

It arrives five years after the original recording sessions and four years after frontman Liam's passing. 

Here are some words from the band's drummer, Luke:

"Husk was initially tracked on the 6th of August 2016. Liam and I had originally planned to track an EP of songs that were written more recently, but decided to lay down some older, unreleased songs to bulk it out into an album. We had finished recording an EP with The Bad Dad Orchestra just prior to Husk, where all the instruments were tracked individually and chopped/changed a lot in post production. We both thought tracking guitar and drums live with Guthrie would be more our vibe, so that's what we did. Our friend Jamie Stacey engineered the recording and we literally just faced each other in the studio, hit record and played all the songs as if we were doing a gig. Some songs are first takes, some second. No click tracks, no punch ins, no bullshit. Vocals were done later because Liam wanted to concentrate on his guitar playing. There's a couple of overdubbed guitar bits and pieces, a droning bass synth in 'Blues Man' some percussion in a couple of verses and that's really it. Dave played around with some effects and stuff when he was mixing, but it's all the live performances. There's a couple of mistakes in there that probably should have been edited out! I guess it adds to the charm though.

The album had been mixed and was ready to be mastered at the time of Liam's passing, releasing it was a mental hurdle that I couldn't get through, so my friend Dave Cooper ended up doing all the leg work for me - and I am extremely grateful that he did.

Tracked on the 5th of August 2016
Recorded and Engineered by Jamie Stacey
Mixed by Dave Cooper of Sound Machine Studios
Mastered by William Bowden of King Willy Sound
Artwork by Sheridan Kerr of GOOD GRAVY

Release: August 5th, 2021, MGM Distribution
Words: Luke Young