Esteemed Australian rock band The Drones are playing at Splendour In The Grass this week, hitting the G.W. McLennan stage on the third and final day between Gurrumul and You Am I (performing Hi-Fi Way), and then heading out on another Australian headline tour across the country in September.
It’s just a portrait of what has been a very busy year of touring for the five-piece. Back in March they supported Neil Young & Crazy Horse, April saw them heading out on a headline tour with support from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard; late May they played Primavera Sound before hitting Tasmania’s inaugural Dark MOFO the following month.
Their busy touring schedule all started with the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival they helped curate in February, I’ll Be Your Mirror Melbourne, while releasing their critically acclaimed sixth album, I See Seaweed.
The record, which our Tone Deaf reviewer proclaimed “the perfect Drones album, and one of the year’s best releases – Australian or otherwise” has marked a fertile creative period for the band, and not just in touring, with guitarist Dan Luscombe revealing in a forthcoming Tone Deaf interview that there’s more Drones material “on the bench,” with the band looking at starting work on a new album early next year.
When asked if The Drones had anything in the pipeline beyond their slot on the Harvest lineup in November, Luscombe replied, “we’re going to go into pre-production for another record. We had a pretty lengthy break between [2008 album] Havilah and this one and now we seem to have a newfound enthusiasm for keeping the ball rolling. I think there might be a trip to Europe before the year’s out but besides that…” “We’re going to go into pre-production for another record… There are few songs on the bench.” – Dan Luscombe
The Melbourne guitarist added that drummer Mike Noga had relocated to London, saying “so Mike will go back there but I think the rest of us will just get stuck into a bit of pre-production and get the songs ready for Mike to come and play on.”
“We have our own studio now,” says Luscombe of the facility located just outside Myrtleford in rural Victoria purpose-built for the recording of I See Seaweed, the band’s sixth full-length release. “We’ve amassed a lot of gear over the years and we now have a fully equipped place to record our own albums without really spending any money anymore, so we might as well use that,” says Luscombe.
The guitarist and the rest of the Drones lineup – incendiary frontman Gareth Liddiard, bassist Fiona Kitschen, newly added pianist Steve Hesketh, and Noga – have already made some headway in the writing process. “There are few things that we got started on in the Seaweed sessions that just didn’t make it, mainly because we didn’t have time to finish them,” Luscombe reveals.
“There are few songs on the bench – they weren’t on the bench because they were inferior to the others, they just weren’t finished. We’re finishing a few of them and I think Gaz is writing some words for a couple more new ones right now,” he adds, saying that the leftover material was put on hold; “We just got to the eight songs that we had and thought ‘we’re certainly [finished]’.”
“We were thinking about all the great albums that only have eight songs… Led Zeppelin’s IV, [Television’s 1977 debut] Marquee Moon, [Van Morrison’s 1968 album] Astral Weeks – and we decided eight is enough,” he says.
The full interview with Dan Luscombe will be published on Tone Deaf ahead of the band’s forthcoming headline Australian tour, hitting stages around the country in September with support from Melbourne’s Harmony. The Drones also play the third-ever Harvest Festival this November, alongside the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Neutral Milk Hotel, and headliners Massive Attack.
