The Belair Lip Bombs are taking the 'Ninch to Nashville
Frankston's finest are releasing their first album since joining Third Man Records, and they're not playing it safe.
Have you heard the joke about Frankston? If you search for the coastal Melbourne suburb on YouTube, you’ll see a string of videos like “I Survived 24 Hours in Melbourne’s Most Dangerous Area” and “Visiting Australia’s Most Dangerous Suburb!” by some vlogging rage merchants.
For those who grew up around certain parts of Melbourne, you either knew of Frankston as the mythological badlands of the (let’s be real) very safe city, or you had a local equivalent.
The Belair Lip Bombs would’ve heard it all, too. The four Frankston locals — guitarist and vocalist Maisie Everett, drummer Daniel ‘Dev’ Devlin, bassist Jimmy Droughton and guitarist Mike Bradvica — came together and found their feet playing local shows, incubating in what was less a warzone and more a vibrant creative scene.
“I think the Peninsula is a great place to connect with other kids who are creative or into music, because it’s sort of easier to weed people out down there,” Dev tells me over Zoom.
“For us, having somewhere like Singing Bird Studio in Frankston was really important. We rehearsed there a lot and were able to start out there, play our first shows there, and meet kids and form that community.”
The band wears their hometown as a “badge of honour”, even as their world grows exponentially. The Belair Lip Bombs’ second album Again could make them Australia’s next big musical export, marking their first original release since signing with Jack White’s indie label Third Man Records.
Serving as the follow-up to 2023’s Lush Life, put out by Frankston DIY label Cousin Will, the new record is a testament to how fast The Belair Lip Bombs are coming along. They sound assured, making the tenets of classic rock feel fresh and invigorated. It’s their best work yet, striking the tricky balance of honing their established sound and branching out into new pockets.
“We didn’t have as much time to write this album, but we had more of a well-rounded idea of what Lip Bombs was and maybe what we wanted to explore,” Dev says. “We wanted to make an album that had lots of different moods and vibes, and I think we achieved that.”
The result is a record that is more fierce and confident, something Dev credits to producer Joe White (of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever) for “help[ing] shape the record.”
“He’s a great musician himself, but also a big supporter of the band to begin with, so he really understood the sound and was really helpful in getting the songs from that 90 percent point to the 100 percent finish line.”
The little flourishes are all over the record. Lead single ‘Hey You’ is a patiently building thunderstorm with an impeccably deployed motherfucker on the pre-chorus. ‘If You’ve Got The Time’ is a blossoming jam partly inspired by the Rolling Stones. ‘Price Of A Man’ draws you in with captivating songwriting and keeps you around with its dynamic performance.
On Lush Life, the band established itself for some strong hooks and strong rock chops, but Again sees them daring to do a few things differently — ‘Cinema’ is the poppiest song they’ve done, heavily leaning on funk with a brilliantly laconic chorus, while the penultimate ‘Burning Up’ is a stripped-back piano-led anthem made to get phone torches waving.
“They’re two of our favourites on the album, just because they were two big labours of love on the record,” Dev says.
“For ‘Burning Up’ we recorded a version that kind of sounds like ‘Summertime’ by The Sundays, or like Sugar Ray or Third Eye Blind, like very ’90s rock. It’s very much not like that now. It sounds like a piano ballad now. So that really changed, and that was a really fun, challenging experience in the studio — transforming that song from one entirely different thing to another.
“‘Cinema’ was one of those songs where we probably wrote, like, ten different choruses for that song, and we almost scrapped it just because we couldn’t land a chorus. But we pushed through it because we loved that song.”
Iteration comes up a lot when the band talks about Again. It’s an achievement that, despite the time spent tweaking and tinkering, the songs sound as free as they do. Album opener ‘Again and Again’ is a downright blast and the record rarely lets up from there.
The band isn’t just growing as studio musicians, but they’re also racking up other career milestones. When Dev and I speak, he’s just conquered his jetlag after the band’s longest ever tour supporting Spacey Jane across North America (six weeks, 25 shows, 17,500 kilometres in a van, by Dev’s calculations).
“It was very, very long, but so much fun,” he said. “The best part was just playing in cities for the first time and meeting fans. We were supporting another band, but it was really sweet when people were there to see us and who had been listening to our music for a long time and maybe never thought we’d actually make it over to the States.”
Those North Americans probably don’t need to worry. Again is the sort of record that makes bands very famous, and it’s being released on a label that is important enough for tastemakers around the world to sit up and take notice. Enjoy The Belair Lip Bombs while they’re here, because the stage is set for them to take off sooner rather than later.
‘Again’ is out October 31 via Third Man Records. Pre-order on Bandcamp or pre-save on Apple Music.