On scene with Sleepazoid
Melbourne's alt-rock rising stars know how much of a 'slog' the music industry is. That's why they're putting their everything into 'New Age'.
Last time Sleepazoid were set to release an EP, nobody knew they existed. Not in a mean way, like they had no fans, but in a very literal sense: Sleepazoid formed, then spent a year writing and recording, before revealing themselves to the world or playing a show.
“It was just the five of us,” Nette France (vocals/guitar) tells me. “You get a bit of a reward when you’re playing shows. You write songs, rehearse, play the show, and be like, ‘Wow, that was so fun’. We didn’t have that. We were just grinding away.”
That release, running with the dogs, was an eye-catching debut EP that put them on the industry’s radar. It was potent, genre-warping guitar music, making rotation on Triple J and earning Sleepazoid a run of dates opening for Faye Webster at the Enmore and Forum.
Sleepazoid’s second EP, New Age, will not slip by in anonymity. After January support slots with Fcukers and DZ Deathrays, the band will release New Age and celebrate by playing Laneway Festival. Then, after a national headline tour with Beryl in March, Sleepazoid will take the EP abroad for their first international shows in the United Kingdom.
For now, it’s the calm before the storm. When I meet Sleepazoid, they’re seated in a small courtyard at the back of a cafe in Brunswick in Melbourne’s inner north. It’s a warm, windy morning, and our conversation is backed by the steady clattering of a nearby construction site. I ask the band how it feels to be releasing an EP now, with more attention, after the covert launch of their debut.
“I’m more confident, but also less confident,” Josef Pabis (bass) says with a laugh.
Jim Duong (guitar) grapples with the question: “It’s been affirming for sure, but it also makes you question…” he thinks for a second and glances at George Inglis (guitar). Sleepazoid’s fifth member Luca Soprano (drums) isn’t present to assist, but I should mention that he’s also in the band.
“We’ve kind of just got to do it now,” Inglis says with a smile. Duong nods: “We’ve gotten this for just being like, this is the music and this is how it should feel. Let’s just continue doing that.”
If that’s the working process that yielded New Age, it’s hard to argue with the results. The EP is a sonic leap forward for one of Australia’s most promising new bands. Across five songs, Sleepazoid home in on a sound that’s distinctly theirs: an ephemeral, shape-shifting twist on alt-rock that is both urgent and impressive. France, a dynamic vocalist, finds a deeper well of candour. It’s a huge step up from a band who already hit the ground running.
“Have you seen that movie Limitless?” France deadpans. “We got the pill.”
Inglis offers an alternative explanation to Sleepazoid’s level up: “We wrote this EP in the studio that we did our first EP, and we’d written all our music before we played our first show. That first EP, we were finding our sound. But the fidelity we were going for, we were always going to get here.”
It’s that c-word again — confidence. Not just in their abilities as musicians, but in one another.
“We’ve been through some shit,” Duong says with an exhale and a laugh, to nods and a murmur of agreement.
We parse through the band’s complicated web of concurrent and prior musical connections: Nette and Josef came from Canberra, where they played in Sputnik Sweetheart. George toured briefly with Sputnik, and is high school friends with Luca. Together, George and Luca make music as Sapphire Street and play in Fairtrade Narcotics. Luca also performs in r.em.edy’s live band, alongside Jim, who is part of Public Leisure.
“We became friends through music, first and foremost,” France says. This became particularly important as she navigated a ‘life imploding’ breakup, which became the fuel for the EP’s title track ‘New Age’.
“I was able to be probably the most vulnerable I’ve ever been in my songwriting on this second EP, because I had the trust and love of the band,” she says.
During our interview, Duong and Pabis identified France’s songwriting as the strongest point of difference in Sleepazoid’s music. As Duong puts it, France is the “emotional vessel” that the rest of the band is “trying to augment”.
There were flashes of this across running with the dogs: On ‘Chomp’, France’s snappy hook “You must cross tram tracks with confidence” is very fun and factually accurate, and ‘Alice’ is a magical, alluring song written in the vein of Alex G. But ‘New Age’ opens the floodgates to unleash a more direct, piercing Nette France. When she tells an ex-lover on ‘New Age’, “I really loved you, I know you know that”, it’s lacerating both in delivery and scripture. On ‘Fig Tree’, she’s haunted, wracked with insomnia, and incredibly tender.
“I’ve been writing songs for 1,000 years but, for some reason it took me a while to feel comfortable to really write from my own perspective,” France says. “It’s vulnerable to share and it also requires you to really sit with the emotions and get them out.
“They’re little time capsules of things that I’ve been through, and I also like that. They’re not always, sometimes they’re just personal because they talk to a feeling, but that feeling comes up again, and you can cast new experiences onto those songs and that brings up similar feelings.”
As France developed comfort confronting honesty in her songwriting, Sleepazoid were wrestling with the nuances of New Age’s finer points. I ask the band to break down the making of ‘New Age’ for me, a song that sounds like three songs masterfully coalesced into one.
Jim Duong sets the scene, a “normal morning” at Perfect Squeak Studios, a space run by Soprano and Inglis: “Nette was like, ‘I have this idea’. And then she put her guitar in Drop D and just started playing the riff. But not as it is, it was a lot slower, more groovy. It bounced around a bit more. As soon as I heard that, I was like, ‘No, that needs to be fucking this.’”
“We were stewing on that riff for a while, just always playing it and being like, ‘Wow, yeah, it’s something’,” Inglis says. “Then I remember one of our ‘aha moments’ was, when we were playing the verse groove and we tried to go into the chorus groove, and we tried Luca slowing us down. The first time we did that, and it worked, we were like, ‘that’s it!’”
It’s the most animated the four get during our conversation, reminiscing over creative frustrations and breakthroughs. The band are unapologetically enamoured with the craft of making music. Pabis speaks about music as his social gateway to a world outside of his childhood hometown of Bathurst. Inglis tells me music is his “entire world” and Duong says he never wants to stop being a part of the Melbourne music scene.
It’s a romantic way to speak about creating art, in an industry that often punishes those who love it the most. But don’t be deceived into thinking Sleepazoid don’t understand that — this is, after all, five artists who have more or less done it all across the Melbourne DIY scene. And as France summarises, the band know the trials and tribulations that await them in their pursuit of glory.
“We all try really hard. Caring is cool. Gone are the days of, like, ‘I’m too cool to care’. It’s a fucking slog, so you have to care.”
‘New Age’ is out February 5 via Surreal Sound. Pre-order on Qobuz here. Sleepazoid are touring Australia from March 6 with Beryl and local supports (tickets).