As Flaming Wrekage’s brutal fourth album tickles your earholes, you know this is something special. …
Perth outfit Tired Lion have had a crazy few years.
Since 2015, the band have been winning awards, copping some well earned airplay, releasing EPs, and touring the world. The rockers are clearly in a rush to make a lot of noise and we’re all for it. On Friday, September 15, the band will be levelling up even further with the release of their debut album, Dumb Days, featuring fan favourite tracks Fresh and Cinderella Dracula. The album is already shaping up to be a smash hit. The release will be book ended with a run of live dates and celebration. We sat down with Ethan and Sophie from the band to chat about how they’re dealing with all this action.
Hysteria: It must be pretty mad in your world at the moment. The big debut album comes out in September, which judging by how this year’s gone, it’s gonna be here any minute now. How’s it feel right now to be so close to releasing the big debut?
Sophie: It’s feeling good. I feel like for the first time in my life, I’m on the right track, if that makes sense. You kind of like, as a young kid, or at least I have, been thinking about it for a while releasing a debut album. I know we all have. So the fact that it’s just around the corner is kinda like a little bit of pinch me moment, like, “Oh this is happening.” But yeah, it’s pretty rad. We’re all psyched to release it, and play some new songs and hopefully people dig it.
Ethan: I think that’s the most important thing for us is definitely playing new songs live cause we’ve only had two EPs pretty much up until now.
Sophie. And we’ve been touring a fuckload. We’ve been racking that shit hard.
Considering how close you guys are to this moment, you seem ridiculously chilled, like maybe this is because I’ve caught you at the moment where it’s all happening. But it seems like you guys are quietly confident in this one. You’re not stressing. You’re not pacing back and forth… Are you feeling confident about this release?
Ethan: It’s not so much confidence. I think when something, me personally, when something feels right, like I’ve done the best I can in the situation, and everything feels right, done everything the way I’d imagined I’d do it. There’s no stress ’cause I did what I set out to do, I did it well, and it’s done.
Sophie: I think for me it’s one of those things where a lot of people, well, a lot of people that I know in bands seem to get really wrapped up in the business side of things and I kinda stopped that early on in the piece, where I thought, “Why am I starting to think about all these tiny little things that don’t matter to me?”
Like politics or red tape?
Sophie: Yeah, it’s just like all this stuff. We need to get this, we need to push this over the line, we want people to buy this many units, whatever. I’m like “Fuck, the reason why I started playing music was because it made me feel good.” And so you mention, Why aren’t you … You don’t look frazzled.” Yeah, there’s times where you’re like “Oh fuck, I’ve gotta do this, this and that.” But it’s more like the things you have to do. So if you’ve got control over what you can think about, that’s something that I feel naturally now. I’m not steering down that pathway in my mind-frame. I’m like, “Well, yeah.” Like Ethan said, we just made a record and we had a lot of fun with it and we’re happy with it, so there’s nothing we can really do now. If it’s stressing about it. Yeah. Pretty happy with it.
There’s no stress ’cause I did what I set out to do, I did it well, and it’s done.
[ETHAN]
How did you find the whole process? You have EPs. From what I understand from my side of the fence: the two processes are completely different from the EP to the album in terms of the logistics. How did you guys find it?
Sophie: So different, yeah.
Ethan: I think looking back on EPs and stuff like that. I think that was more of a process of like, we need five songs. On an album, it was more like, “let’s write for two years.”
Sophie: We were on the road for a lot, so it was hard to juggle between writing and getting together as a band and putting songs together and things like that. But, we managed to do it in the end, which was really good. And there were some songs on the record that we didn’t even think we’d make the cut. They were just tiny 40 second clips that Luke found to be like, “There’s a whole song there. Let’s do this.”
It was pretty interesting. Doing those two EPs prior really did help us to understand what you’re going to be up for in the studio, what’s expected of you. You’re gonna feel under pressure and feel like you need to perform in that moment and you have to. There’s nothing you can do. You gotta switch it on. It’s not like you can hit a knob on Ethan’s arm and say, “More intensity on the kit, let’s just hit that up.” He has to be in the right mind-frame. Same thing with vocals. If it’s not sounding like it’s genuine or if it doesn’t have enough intensity or something, you can’t just hit a tone knob on the computer. You actually have to go back to the space when you wrote the song, think about the lyrics, do all that dumb shit, to get into the right head space. So, I think, yeah, those two EPs prior really did help us to get into the right mind-frame.
So what did you find interested you guys musically this time round? What’s different from a couple of years ago to now?
Sophie: I actually answered a question the other day. Someone said, “If you were to release this record, maybe two years earlier, what would it be like?” And it’s exactly what the first EP was like. We would just pretty much every song was in drop D, and we were obsessed with Siamese Dreams, Smashing Pumpkins. I think it has a massive effect on what you’re into at the time, and what bands are influencing you. Yeah, so, we’ve definitely grown a lot since that first EP, or we didn’t know, that’s for sure.
Ethan: Yeah, obviously it’s never a mental thing of changing. It’s never like, “Oh, we need to do this, or we need to do that. We need more of this.” It just happens.
Listen to the entire interview with Tired Lion on Hysteria Radio!
Tired Lion will be releasing their full length album Dumb Days on September 15 through Dew Process/Universal Music Australia, pre-order here.
Catch Tired Lion on their Dumb Days Tour this September with special guests Food Court & Foam
Fri Sep 15, Wooly Mammoth, Brisbane QLD
Sat Sep 16, Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Fir Sep 22, Jive Venue, Adelaide SA
Sat Sep 23, The corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Fri Sep 29, Amplifier, Perth WA
