These New South Whales feel immortal on 'GODSPEED'
Jamie Timony opens up about the personal and political behind the Melbourne punks' remarkable new album.
As These New South Whales were putting the finishing touches on their last record, 2022’s TNSW, frontman Jamie Timony was in the midst of a personal crisis. After nine years in an Alcoholics Anonymous program, he was getting out.
“I had to speak to every significant person in my life about my decision because, over the years, I had telegraphed to them the importance of being in a program like that for me,” Timony tells me over Zoom. “Then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Actually, now I’m telling you the opposite, which is that I don’t need to be in this and that it’s all bullshit.’”
Traces of Timony’s experience bleed into TNSW if you squint, but it’s shrouded in cryptic lyrics and metaphor. On GODSPEED, the band’s just-released fourth album, there’s no ambiguity.
“It takes a little while to unplug from all that and really process and come back to yourself,” he says. “I guess I had a bit more talking to do about it on this record.”
The album opens and closes with the same powerful call to action: “The choice is yours, godspeed.” On the title track, Timony issues a searing rebuke of the “unhealthy control and power dynamics” he experienced during his time in Alcoholics Anonymous.
“The basis of these things is that you are ‘diseased’, that you are ‘sick’, that you are permanently powerless,” he explains. “The truth is, you’re not and you’ve got the ability to change if you can see a better way forward.”
GODSPEED is the artistic actualisation of Timony’s better way forward. It’s a polished odyssey of guitar music that nods to everyone from Ceremony to The Replacements. GODSPEED is a milestone record in the 13-year journey which has seen These New South Whales rise from being best known for their mockumentary to one of Australia’s finest punk bands.
It is an impressive evolution from TNSW, the band’s first committed foray into making music completely detached from their comedic identity. That was a great album, but it hummed and growled without ever really baring its teeth. That’s not an issue on GODSPEED, which unleashes Frank Sweet to punish the drums, challenges Todd Andrews’ versatility on guitar, and leans hard on Will Shepherd to keep pace on bass.
If TNSW was the reset for a band looking to shed its reputation for comedy, GODSPEED is the cohesive record that cements their arrival. The album pulsates with snark, rage, and defiance, an energy that a New South Whales album hasn’t captured before. Timony pins that partly on his experience in AA, which he said conditioned him to feel “defective” if he experienced anger or resentment.
“There’s basically no place for it in these sorts of spiritual programs, and I say spiritual loosely. They regard themselves as spiritual, but there’s very little room for emotion like that,” he says.
“Coming outside of that, it was really nice to be like, ‘Oh, I am allowed to be outwardly angry, there’s nothing wrong with that.’ It is a poison if you want to stay in that state, sure, but you’re allowed to express that emotion, and you’re allowed to feel resentful about things, and you’re allowed to feel unforgiving towards things as well.”
That anger was shaped in part by the world that Timony and the band were looking out at.
“There’s been a genocide taking place in Palestine that’s been live streamed across all of our phones, and we’ve got a government who do nothing. In fact, they do worse than nothing, which is, they aid and abet it,” he says. “It’s felt, for everyone, like a really awful time on a global scale, when there’s all this horror going on and seemingly, no one wants to stop it.”
GODSPEED has an uncompromising message, but it’s never a miserable listen. The band is writing its catchiest, most anthemic music, and their humour persists (cf. ‘BIG MACHINE’, TV on the Radio’s ‘Happy Idiot’ for a new generation). The record was born out of fun, on a four-day writing retreat at an isolated house in the rainforests of Victoria’s Otways, which was “50-50” work and play.
“We love each other’s company, we love a few beers together and having a laugh,” Timony says. “We were playing, like eight hours a day or something like that, in bursts. And we were never like, ‘Oh, I guess we better get back to it’. We’d have, like, a three hour break and then be bored and start playing again.”
After 13 years in a band, it’s unusual to find such persistent and enduring camaraderie. I ask Timony what the secret to longevity is.
“We’re all actually very respectful of each other in the band, and we’re all very polite to each other, majority of the time anyway,” he says. “We obviously have little tiffs and shit now and then, but generally speaking, we’re all just very nice to each other.”
Sonically, the album runs the gamut from hardcore to stadium rock to traditional punk to Britpop, and a whole lot else in between. It’s a record overflowing with ambition, kept on the rails by the steady hand of producer Ben Greenberg (also known as the guitarist of New York noise-punks Uniform).
“He brought a lot of good suggestions to the table that really helped and pushed us along musically. To me, it’s my favorite sounding record of all of them,” he says.
Greenberg’s fingerprints are all over the record, which Timony says brought “a lot of life and personality” to GODSPEED — he rearranged rhythms on the post-punk ‘R.I.P. ME’, the propulsive bassline and chunky guitars on the stadium rock lead single ‘INSTINCT’, and won a hard-fought battle to overhaul the bopping punk anti-cop anthem ‘PIG’:
“It was a lot slower, then Ben upped it by 38 BPM (beats per minute). It turned super fast. So, that song changed completely. It became very difficult to sing because it was so fast,” Timony says.
“We actually fought him for a while on it, and he wouldn’t back down. So, we just ended up going his way.”
Uncompromising voices work well with Timony and the band, who enlisted rising director Passive Kneeling (aka Tom Vanderzeil) to shoot four music videos in two days.
“He’s a very confident director, he knows what he likes and doesn’t like and is not afraid to tell you. He told me my head looked like an egg, because I was wearing a hood, and that I needed to pull my hair forward a bit. I really appreciated that,” Timony says, sincerely.
“Tom came fully prepared with four different visual treatments for each of the songs, which I thought was pretty awesome. He had a plan to shoot each of them differently, light each of them differently, grade each of them differently, edit each of them differently. So he was organised and had a vision.”
Between Timony’s praise for Vanderzeil and Greenberg, I think back to the mockumentary These New South Whales made over a decade ago.1
The series, a cross between This Is Spinal Tap and The Office, portrays a fictionalised version of the band in which they are dysfunctional and beholden to Timony’s egomania. In their series, their director dresses them in diapers and their producer leaves his nephew in charge.
The reality was, I’m sure, never this way. But it’s a long way from the These New South Whales we see on GODSPEED: a band with a real producer, a real director, and a real sense of purpose, finally playing like they know exactly who they are.
Most groups don’t get this far and fewer still get better at this stage. But These New South Whales are levelling up and finding their voice, defiant and unrelenting, and it feels like the precursor to an even bigger blow-up.
‘GODSPEED’ is out now. Listen now on Bandcamp or Apple Music.
Something exciting I couldn’t fit into the piece: a full-length film follow-up is the pipeline, with around five drafts of the script finished.