Plenty To Do

It's been an amazing couple of years for Gold Coast duo Bleeding Knees Club. In that time they've morphed from being one of the dozens of burgeoning Aussie rock'n'roll acts with promise to one of the leaders of the pack, having traversed the world repeatedly on the back of their debut album, Nothing To Do, which dropped earlier this year. Now the touring cycle for that album is nearly at an end, but before they hit the studio to begin work on the much-awaited follow-up they're going to drop one more single, Let It Go, and hit the road for an extensive national shindig with their extended family of party animals.

“We haven't been playing many shows really, just trying to relax – we had a pretty busy year last year and the start of this year, so we've just been chillin',” a laidback Alex Wall proffers of what's been happening of late. “We've demoed a new album, hopefully we can record it next year, so we've just been doing that.

“The last year or so has been pretty crazy – our life has completely changed, but it's cool. I think the album's done reasonably well. The Nothing To Do Tour was amazing – it was the best tour we could have possibly done, I think. Every show had really good crowds, and we toured with our friends Dune Rats so the whole tour was so much fun, and the crowds were really energetic and there was heaps of good stories. I think that someone crowd surfed at literally every show, which is awesome.”

Bleeding Knees Club are definitely part of a new breed of bands keen to bring the party back to venues, blurring the division between artist and audience as distinct from just turning up, plugging in and rocking out.

“Yeah, it's funny,” Wall laughs. “I hadn't been to [see] many bands where people have been crowd surfing in Australia. A couple of years ago no one was really doing it, but now it seems like it's really coming back, which is really good. We got in a bit of trouble from venues on the last tour – I'm not sure what we're supposed to do but apparently it's our fault.”

It's not just Australian venues that have been ransacked; Bleeding Knees Club have been racking up the frequent flyer points on the overseas trail as well. So, which foreign market is getting them the most so far?

“I think definitely the UK got us the most – we played some really awesome shows over there last time we went,” Wall continues. “They're a pretty fun crowd to play to, they've been getting into it heaps which is awesome. We haven't been back to the States since South By Southwest – that was a fun little tour, and South By itself was awesome. There just seems to be so many bands in America which makes it a bit harder over there, especially in our genre. Every band seems to be a garage band in America, so it's sort of hard to compete. There's even more competition than since we started now I reckon – [there's] thousands of good bands. But it's better than there being a thousand new dubstep bands, or trance bands.”

Let It Go is being pushed as the first BKC song that Wall and his bandmate Jordan Malone wrote together, but it won't be ushering in any new era of collaboration.

“Not really,” Wall reflects. “Jordan lives in Melbourne now and I live on the Gold Coast still, so we don't really practice or write together anymore that much. And I've already written a whole new album, which I wrote by myself. I don't know, it's cool writing songs together and I hope we can do that down the track. Living apart is definitely different – we used to do all our work together and hang out together and stuff, and now it's really weird. We don't really practice that much anymore – not that we really did – because it's too hard, but it's fine. We still play good when we play live and stuff and we sort everything out via email – it's still cool. It's actually better, because we hated each other when we were seeing each other every single day, so it's good now that we get to go on tour and hang out again.”

Wall explains that not only does the new material have a different flavour, but that they've added a full-time drummer to the mix to allow him to emerge from behind the kit.

“It's a bit more mature and a bit more punk – it's kind of like pop-punk, but not like Short Stack or anything,” he laughs of the new material. “It's more like '90s punk with that Blink-182 vibe. It's a lot bigger. And we've got a new drummer now who adds heaps of dynamic, he's an amazing drummer. I've written a lot of stuff with him because he lives in Byron and it's easy to jam with him, and it sounds really big and a lot more energetic. It's cool.

“It was quite a conscious thing – we were all massive fans of Blink when we were teenagers, and that whole So-Cal punk scene, and it's kind of like we all started listening to it again on tour and realised how awesome it was, and started writing songs like that. Our shows are already pretty punk but our last album wasn't that punk, I guess – people said it was but it wasn't – but this new stuff feels like it will suit our live show a lot better. We have to play bigger venues now and it will suit that a lot better, and I think people will really like it.

“[The new set-up] is way different, because before I was playing drums and I'm the worst drummer in the world, so I had to write songs that I would be able to drum to, but now we have him there's a lot more space to be able to do different things, and there's a lot more freedom to write harder stuff to play.”

And even though they're heading into album number two with a whole lot more external expectation because of their recent successes, Wall reckons that he's not feeling any additional pressure.

“I feel more relaxed if anything, because we're way more confident with these new songs than we were with the old songs, and I guess we've got a pretty good fanbase now,” he reasons. “It seems like our fans are better than other bands' fans – they just love everything we do and get really involved in stuff, and they seem to like us not just because of our music but because they like our whole vibe. That gives you confidence going into the recording because we know that our fans will stick by our side no matter what.”