There’s a portrait of Paul McCartney that sits over Harvey Geraghty’s shoulder as he talks to me on Zoom. The Lazy Eyes vocalist and multi-instrumentalist is telling me about the long road to the Sydney four-piece’s second album Cheesy Love Songs, a process that saw them deconstruct their psych-rock debut SongBook and practically rebuild their sound from scratch. But my eyes keep drifting back to the painting.
In many ways, the spectre of The Beatles (and iconic bands of their ilk) has cast a shadow over The Lazy Eyes since they burst out the blocks, playing Laneway Festival in 2020 before even releasing a song.
By the time the Sydney four-piece’s debut album SongBook hit the world in 2022, The Lazy Eyes were your favourite music nerd’s favourite new Australian band: the bevy of glowing reviews couldn’t help themselves with the comparisons game — King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Tame Impala and, of course, The Beatles.
But living in the shadow of giants can leave you cold, even if the references were more ‘in the style of’ than prognostications about their future trajectory. When The Lazy Eyes went to work on the follow-up to SongBook, Geraghty and bandmate Itay Shachar tell me, the weight of expectation shifted the energy.
“We really went through a bit of a crisis of believing in ourselves,” Shachar says. “That manifested in different parts of the process: not being able to capture the productions and questioning if the songs were good enough, and then when we had to sing, not believing in ourselves as singers.”
The setbacks forced the band to start and stop work, over and over, with each successive collapse in confidence adding to the time pressure the band felt to have something new in the world.
In the end, the circuit-breaker was returning to their roots: a home studio in Lindfield, where they’d first hashed out SongBook without expectation or anxiety, “making this music for fun, the same way that mates would hang out and play PlayStation”, as Geraghty puts it in press materials.
In familiar trappings, The Lazy Eyes went back to basics and recorded minimalistically. Eventually, incrementally, it worked: unlocking a softer, more vulnerable side of the band that shaped the sound of their long-awaited second studio album Cheesy Love Songs (out August 21).
Cheesy Love Songs is a collection of, well, what the name suggests. The album pares back the psychedelic in favour of chamber pop, with cleaner harmonies and a more spacious, melody-driven sound. The explosions of colour, such as on ‘You Were A Child’, are rich, lavish and sun-soaked.
I put to Geraghty and Shachar that such a reinvention is a particularly brave response to a period of self-doubt, and that the easier way forward might’ve been doubling down on a sound that had been proven successful.
“That’s so funny,” Geraghty says with a wry smile. “As you said that, I thought of a handful of fan comments that were like, ‘it’s not experimental enough’ or ‘it’s just the same old Lazy Eyes.”
On the other hand, Shachar chimes in with contrasting feedback he’d read: “‘Oh, they’re just doing more pop so they can be more accessible and commercial, it’s not as brave as the first album’.”
Those isolated examples don’t form a consensus: in the YouTube comments for ‘Never Will She Know’, an “old NYC rocker” calls it a “tasty track”, while another on a live performance video asks “why does it genuinely sound like angels singing?”. Perhaps, most notably, The Lazy Eyes boasts a fan in Sean Ono Lennon — the son of John and Yoko, and a musician in his own right — who shared one of their covers on social media.
“We’ve talked to Sean before, so it wasn’t our first rodeo with him,” Geraghty says. “We said we hoped he liked the new album and he said he was keen to listen to it because he liked the first one, which is awesome.”
If you’re reading this, Sean, I think you’ll be a fan. Cheesy Love Songs is a canvas of The Lazy Eyes’ past and present, weaving the old and new threads together seamlessly. The title itself is a nod to the band’s first single ‘Cheesy Love Song’, and the record repurposes and resculpts their prior work throughout: ‘Imaginary Girl’ from SongBook is adapted twice across the opening three tracks, first on ‘The One Who Got Away’ and again on ‘Mr Histograph’.
“The songs that stemmed off ‘Imaginary Girl’, from my distant memory, just came from jamming our songs at home. Sometimes you just play your own songs and mess around with them, and then sometimes they spur off into this other thing,” Geraghty says. “It’s like ‘Imaginary Girl’ has a sister or brother. Sometimes songs have siblings.”
Other songs are a clean break from the past: ‘How Does It Feel To Be In Love?’ is indebted to early Coldplay, or an Oasis ballad, while album closer ‘Every Day I Lay In Bed’ bucks the theme to instead linger on depression and dread.
“We decided to leave that as the closer, just because I feel like it captures a really important part of making the album, which was that it was hard and pretty depressing at times,” Shachar says.
Weathering the storm and producing a body of work that the band is proud of makes the album a triumph no matter what happens from here. We could fill the MCG ten times over with nascent bands who burnt out after a hit to their confidence, especially in an Australian music industry with little for artistic stumbles.
So it’s commendable that Cheesy Love Songs not only found its way into the world, but that it’s a clear-eyed vision of where the band wants to take their sound. As the band speak more about the record, it’s clear that their faith in themselves is fully renewed. In the wise words of the great Harvey Geraghty: “We are so back.”
‘Cheesy Love Songs’ is out August 21 via AWAL. Pre-save here or pre-order on Bandcamp here.