Melbourne-based shoegaze-emo band Garage Sale has released their debut record “Shimmer” today. We caught up with the band to talk about the inspiration behind the album and the local music scene in Australia.
Where did you draw inspiration from for Shimmer?
Dan: Pretty much the whole band was living together at that point, and I had an EP that we were trying to record and it wasn’t really working out – we were bored of the songs and recording was not going that well so eventually we scrapped it. Then we were chilling, listening to heaps of music around the time that DIIV’s Deceiver was released.
Ben: We all watched that documentary that DIIV put out about Deceiver. I remember watching that and all of us started listening to a bunch of lo-fi bands.
Dan: I think that was the biggest album that really started us getting keen on not playing indie rock, to start doing something more interesting for us. We started writing a whole new thing – just tuned out guitars down to open D and started writing. I think that was a big thing, I was writing all my songs in standard tuning and when I started playing around with open D ideas were coming so much quicker.
Ben: We were listening to a lot of Alex G too, I think that helped.
Dan: We just wanted to do something new I guess. We were emailing music everyday and listening to lots of bands – that’s all we were doing in lockdown.
How did you get the album art for Shimmer?
Ben: We just asked Madeline in Crisman. We asked her because we loved her art and I was doing a lot of the graphic design stuff so we just wanted to find a new, separate person to do our art that we really liked. So we commissioned Madeline to do a piece and she did the art for “Shoes On” really quickly and then did the album art and we really love it.
So you didn’t give her a prompt?
Ben: No, we just said go for it!
Dan: We told her to listen to the album and feel it out and she came back with some watercolor-like sketches. We told her to do whatever she wants.
Ben: She did a pencil sketch of little characters or concepts for each song and that’s where the “Shoes On” art came from and then the album art came together from a bit of all of those designs which was really cool. She came back from listening to the album really loving it and I think that really comes through in her art.
Dan: I like the colors in it, the album isn’t subtle – it’s bold in some ways and I think the art really captures that.
What was the recording process like?
Dan: I started recording ideas into my laptop, just getting rough demos together. Me and Ben listened to those and were playing them through on acoustics to get other parts together and made more demos with more layers and structure. When we had all the songs together we decided we wanted to record them as soon as we could so we started learning to play them really well. We got Calum Newton who we know from the scene – I knew of Calum from when I was in high school because he’s from Lennox Head which is my hometown. He lived around the corner from where we were staying in Melbourne so we thought it would be so cool to record at Cal’s house because he has a studio out the back of his house. So we went in, tracked everything – drums first and just layered everything on top – which is true to how we wrote the songs as well. Cal was really good, he almost produced it as well. I think a lot of engineers can just get out of the way but he was really into working out vocal harmonies with us. He was awesome to record with. It was also so fun being at his house recording, so there was no pressure at all.
Ben: There’s only a few mastering engineers in Melbourne that all the garage bands use – so I think we thought sending it to someone so similar [to Calum] would make it sound too similar to everything people have heard already in Australia. I have been a massive fan of Gleemer and a fan of Corey Coffman’s work so we hit up Corey and he really liked the album as well and wanted to master it.
Dan: Milly was a big influence when we were writing. We were listening to “Talking Secret” over and over again and we were absolutely frothing thinking “I want to make music like this.” I think that’s why we thought to send it to Corey as well.
Ben: It definitely influenced a lot of the end production for it. We wanted something shoegaze-y but still dry and emo enough that it wasn’t too much like Slowdive.
How did you guys find out about these Southern California local bands?
Dan: Spotify? I’m always finding bands and looking at their related artists and going on these dives.
Ben: Lots of rabbit holes. I remember we were super bored in lockdown and I looked up “best new band” or something really stupid on Google and it was an NME article and I think it listed Disq and Milly and a couple other bands we really got into.
Dan: We wanted to listen to new music and find something that felt more contemporary to us because we were struggling to find it here in Australia.
What is your scene like in Australia and specifically Melbourne?
Ben: It’s an interesting scene. There’s always a bubbling independent scene with people trying to start their own labels or little scenes. Each major city in Australia is so far apart so each little scene is very insular. We have one national radio station called Triple J that has a monopoly on the scene and there are bands that are kind of produced or built for that system which is a bit tiring for us as well.
Dan: When you’re a band in high school, your main goal is to get reviewed by someone on Triple J Unearthed which is a station inside Triple J that finds bands and promotes them for free. It could set you up to play good gigs in Australia and get played on the radio. I think it’s dying a bit – nobody cares as much as they did when I was in high school.
Ben: Melbourne has a strong scene, it might be closer to how Los Angeles or New York might operate because we have a bit more of the population here.
Dan: There’s gigs going on and there’s different scenes going on beside each other.
Ben: I think we feel less of the pressure of how isolating it would be in other parts of the country but that’s been a driving factor of us wanting to move outside of Australia to separate ourselves from the cycles that are happening here. All of Australia is the same as the population of California – so that puts it into perspective when I’m having trouble finding bands or venues to work with here. We want to tour since we’ve always been a touring band but it’s really hard.
If you could tour with anyone, like your dream lineup, who would you open for?
Ben: Corey sent us a lovely message the other day, he made a joke about a Milly / Garage Sale / Waveform* / Bedlocked mega-tour. I’d love to tour with those guys, we’re massive fans of the more ballad-y, emo type stuff. We’d love to get over there and meet and see a lot of bands we really respect.
What was the best show you’ve ever been to?
Ben: My first musical experience was at SoundWave Festival which was a lot of metal, pop punk, and emo bands. My dad took me when I was 12 or 13 to see Fall Out Boy because I was a huge fan. That maybe still trumps everything.
Dan: The best show I’ve been to was Dinosaur Jr. at the Northern with my dad, which is a local pub so it was insane to see that band there on a stage that I have performed on as well.
Ben: It’s not a massive venue either, it’s maybe like 300 capacity but it doesn’t seem that big.
Anything else you want to add or any future plans you want to talk about?
Dan: We’re doing a residency at the Evelyn Hotel in August in support of the album!
Ben: We just went in and recorded two new songs in a studio space that we live-tracked, so it’s a bit more representative of what we sound like as a live band. And more touring, hopefully we’ll see you next year!
