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D
eep in the heart of Brisbane, something has been brewing, cooking away in a tin shed studio. Two years on from the release of their surprise breakthrough record, Hungry Ghost, Mansfield’s own Violent Soho are slowly chipping away at crafting its much-anticipated follow-up. When we catch guitarist James Tidswell on the phone, the band are halfway through the process and about to take a little time off. When the Queensland four-piece dropped Hungry Ghost in 2013, they changed the face of Australian rock music as we knew it, bringing sweaty, ‘90s alt-rock and grunge screaming back into the forefront of our independent music scene. Crashing the top end of the triple j Hottest 100 with irresistibly catchy headbangers like “Covered In Chrome” and “Dope Calypso”, their wall of fuzzy guitars and whiney vocals seemed to be just what the doctor ordered, drawing together punks, hipsters, stoners and even young hardcore fans. With the album earning Gold status within a year and no sign of a slip in enthusiasm from their rabid cult fanbase, from the outside it almost looked as if the band could have kept touring Hungry Ghost forever. |
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“That’s exactly how it felt!” exclaims Tidswell. “Which is kind of weird for us, because when we released Hungry Ghost we thought we’d do just one album tour, which was what we booked, and we were kind of just planning to go back to work and keep going on with our lives for a while but the touring just kept going!”A string of sold-out headline runs and big-scale festival appearances at Splendour In The Grass, Falls and Big Day Out led to the exponential growth of the band’s profile. Soon enough Tidswell and co. realised that if they didn’t put a stopper in things and force themselves back to the drawing board, no one would.“I guess we knew it was the right time when we got offered a certain festival spot this year which was like… the most amount of money we’d ever been offered for anything, and for us to say no to it felt kind of strange, but we kind of felt like we’d played to everyone, and we didn’t want to overdo it. We were so appreciative of all the support we had been given in Australia and we just didn’t want to take it for granted. So I’m really pleased we turned it down because now we’re working on a new album, and we’re actually really lazy so it could have taken forever if we just kept touring!”![]() |
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“The best way to put it is that on the album before Hungry Ghost [2010’s Violent Soho] we felt like we had put just as much work into that as we did on Hungry Ghost, and we were just as happy with it at the time – it wasn’t as if we finished Hungry Ghost and went, ‘Fuck yeah, we’ve finally done it right, this is it!’ it was just that people happened to latch onto that album a lot more! We took that into consideration a lot on this new one – we’re the same dudes and we’re happy to still play music together so that eliminates a lot of pressure. We’re just focussing on making sure we like it!“To be honest we are not good travellers – we didn’t even tour Hungry Ghost overseas! Like I said, we’re a bit lazy,” Tidswell laughs. “But we really like Brisbane and the energy that seems to be up here. There are a lot of people that are really involved in the music industry up here, so you can work with people who are solely thinking about the music and not be influenced by what people are into or what other people are listening to. We find it’s like hiding away from people up here; it’s relaxed and there’s plenty of sunshine. Plus, we get to go home every night and we all have wives and kids, so it’s a lot easier.”![]() |
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