The once-prisoners of society have become the guards watching over modern Australian punk rock; roaring guitars, shouty vocals delivered with a proud accent, and topics shifting between politics and personal growth.
The Living End’s new album sounds like they’re driving towards a new beginning, and have maintained a more forward-thinking attitude than their early to mid-2000s contemporaries that’s kept them thriving 20 years after their debut smash. With their newest release Wunderbar coming out on Friday, vocalist/guitarist Chris Cheney talks how the trio encapsulated this mindset of constantly pushing the unbounded goal of writing the best songs they could.
“I always feel that I could write good stuff I’ll write a better song tomorrow, you know”
“We have this great need to not sound tired (laughs) you know, it’s something we are aware of and you know it happens with rock and roll bands they just kind of get old and start slowing down and they get tired.
I just think that we’re very aware of how we sound and how we’re playing and the kind of music we want to make and we just don’t want to fall into that trap of getting old and lame then, so I feel like the songwriting for us is just stronger than ever.”
Chris has the faith in his band required to be the mainstay that they are, but proves that you can’t shake off the self-doubt of a struggling musician,
“It’s a fine line between having, a certain amount of ambition and having a certain amount of confidence in what we do; yet at the same time, it sounds sort of contrary to say this but there’s also a kind of thing of ‘oh shit, I don’t know if I can still do it, like do we still have it, are we good enough, is the band good enough?”
Wunderbar proves just how The Living End cut above and achieved legacy status through the standout musicianship, being consistently been sharp and intricate raising eyebrows from instrument instructors and guitar buffs.
“I guess that we always wanted to be good players and we always looked up to bands I think that were good players, I think that whether it’s the you know, Jimi Hendrix or whether it’s a Cog, you know just any of the bands that we sort of gotten into along our journey.”
“Even the 50s, I mean the 1950’s kind of rock and rollers, were all pretty they were all pretty happening kind of musicians so we always thought.”
However, wanting to stick to the punk mentality and ensure a riotous club show, Chris and co. never sacrificed infectious sing-alongs for a sweaty big day out audience. The balance had to be met for the group to fit the state of punk surrounding them.
“I mean you gotta do it’s kind of a craft you gotta work at and you gotta be the best player that you can but you can’t let that kind of eclipse the songwriting so it’s been you know, there’s a balance there: it’s important to be a good player as far as we’re concerned but it shouldn’t overshadow the songs”
The Living End’s cemented status in Australian rock has always been met with a down-to-earthiness, displayed in the band’s devotion to ballsy, hard-rockin’ tunes without a hint of excess or glam. Chris provides a reason for this – the band did not have quite the idea of their magnitude.
He detailed the memory of ‘Prisoner of Society’s’ rise – “ ‘Society was all over the radio and I don’t think we saw that at the time because we were just so busy from one show to the next and it was like “gotta do another interview”, another radio show, another acoustic session, another late night TV show, it was just one thing after another and it was relentless to the point where we never got a chance to kind of sit back and see what was happening but it’s only now that I can kinda realise, ‘yeah we were big, you know’”
The more Chris talks to people, the more he sees the stretch of their impact.
“I mean all sorts of guys in bands come up, you know, not just like in the punk scene or anything but all sorts of people like I met Amy Shark last night, she’s like “oh really nice to meet you, you know, I’m a big fan”, you know people who you wouldn’t expect, so I guess we’re lucky that we’ve been around long enough that everyone kind of knows a few of our tunes and that we’ve made a much bigger mark that what we ever thought we would”
“It’s kind of scary, but at the same time it’s really honouring and it’s flattering I suppose that the reach of the Living End was so kind of diverse”
Now that it’s all caught up to the boys, they’re more ready than ever to release the culmination of what they can do with Wundebar.
Check out The Living End’s ‘Not Like The Other Boys’:
