Big Strong Brute aka Brisbane songwriter Paul Donoughue is the master of crafting indie pop gems. Having garnered his fair share of acclaim since his debut 2010 release, playing support slots for the likes of First Aid Kit and Jens Lekman, and receiving a nomination for the Australian Music Prize for his 2012 LP Avalanche of Truth, he’s now unleashing his brand new EP Good Work.

The EP follows the lead single ‘Wait’ which was written during an especially grey winter when Donoughue and his partner lived in Germany. “We were having trouble staying up-beat. Sundays were the worst: everything was closed, the city felt abandoned. The song became a kind of call to arms, like: Hey, chin up. We’re young, we’re healthy, we’re being adventurous. Things aren’t as bad as they seem,” he says.

To celebrate the recent release of this stunning EP, Big Strong Brute has given us a track by track run down of the EP check it out below and for more info visit his Soundcloud profile.

Wait

Wait was written during a particularly grey winter when my partner and I lived in Germany. We were having trouble staying up-beat. Sundays were the worst: everything was closed, the city felt abandoned. The song became a kind of call to arms, like: Hey, chin up. We’re young, we’re healthy, we’re being adventurous. Things aren’t as bad as they seem.

Wedding Pages

This song was written after reading an edition of the wedding pages of the New York Times that was particularly heavy on white, affluent, Ivy League-educated couples. It started off being about class and conservatism, and ended up as an attempt to understand why the institution of marriage has to be so old fashioned.

Oh Me Oh My

This is a pretty classic break-up song. It was not inspired by anything that happened in my actual life. When I wrote it, I was reading a lot of George Saunders, one of my favourite writers. I tried to write the song from that general authorial POV he has really mastered: funny but sad.

Heavy Mountain

This is another song about staying optimistic. I wanted to write a deadshit rock song that was lyric-heavy and fictional. It’s my attempt at a short story in song form. It’s about keeping on going — keep truckin’, keep pushin’ — because life’s too brief to not go out and take what you want.

The Roleplay

This song is kind of sad. It’s about how hard it can be to just be yourself when you’re with somebody. Sometimes, we inhabit roles for ourselves — ways we think we have to act or feel. We become like characters in a really long movie.