Putting The Past To Bed

On the phone from his family home in Germany, a freshly-risen Marcel Gadacz verbalises the stretching of his bones. Barely on 8.30am, he's back with his family for the first time in two years, enjoying some quality time with his bloodline and getting a new work visa sorted before things start getting hectic with Dream On Dreamer once more.

With a constant stream of strong punk, metal and 'core bands emerging from Australia in recent years, it's become a tough task for young acts to distance themselves from the pack. Some resort to surface differences: hair, clothing, make-up. Others try and draw attention with sensationalism, be it through film clips, social media or performances. But the groups that have gone the furthest the fastest seem to be the ones that simply concentrate on the one thing that does matter – quality songs.

Dream On Dreamer have done this without all the additional bullshit. They're a band that's built on music, and have succeeded by putting out a solid product and having a strong belief in that – nothing more. This next chapter will be written on those humble foundations no doubt, but understandably Gadacz is invigorated by ideas of what the immediate future for the newly-blooded five-piece holds. “We've just been waiting for [this] moment for almost a year now for a new album to come out, and it's finally coming together and all the stress is going to be relieved and we'll see where it takes us,” he smiles.

Songwriting sessions for Loveless started in August of last year and the frontman concedes that it took a lot of hard work for the band to be happy with the material. However, with a far longer creation time to play with (their 2011 debut full-length Heartbound was made in just six weeks), Dream On Dreamer could afford to crack the whip more forcefully in the quest for musical honesty.

“It just gave us a lot more time to concentrate on how good we are and to push ourselves even harder, y'know,” Gadacz explains, “and even tweak the little things that we wouldn't have had the time to before and make it sound really organic but still... just making it real. That's what the whole point of this album was, just having that real sound that we always wanted to have, but mixing that into a sort of modern production; we wanted to have a real modern sound in a way that it's not fake, so it's still organic and it still has a lot of character to it, and that's exactly what I think we've achieved with that.

“When you record and you have a certain amount of time recording an album or whatever and you work with a producer you know what they are going to make you sound like, production-wise, and from our last album, our first album that we put out, it was all nice, the experience of being in America and having a well-know producer [Cameron Mizell] doing our album and stuff,” Gadacz expands, explaining what he means by “real sound”. “And the outcome was pretty cool, but it wasn't really fully, entirely us. I wouldn't say it sounded fake but it wasn't the exact sound that we wanted to get out of it, but for the time it was really the best thing we could have done as a band, so I don't really regret going [to the US] at all – I loved the whole time. But this is the first time where it was entirely up to us what the record was going to sound like, and Callan [Orr – guitarist] and his brother Kevin, they were so into this record and it's got such a personal bond to the band. They knew exactly what they were going for, and there was no one else mixing or tweaking, it was really just what our ears wanted to hear.”

Keeping it in the family was what this sophomore LP was all about. The Orr brothers took care of all the production duties, while Gadacz looked after the symbolic cover art that adorns the front of the album. It meant more work for the band, sure, but the pride derived from the additional hours is all but worth it.

“It's been a pretty stressful process and it just all sort of came together in the end now,” the frontman tells. “The whole time we've been working on this it's just been... it hasn't been a fun time in a way, there was a lot of hard work, and you can just get someone else to maybe do these things for you but I think for us, going with the approach of doing it all ourselves has been more than rewarding for us and we can just be proud of it.”

And not only does the album see the band tightening the screws on every sonic element – the guitar work more inventive and crushing, the rhythm section stronger with greater versatility – but the vocal delivery of Gadacz leaves nothing inside. He lays himself out for the world to hear, an introspective lyrical journey taking place within his impassioned roars.

“Loveless talks more about a specific time that I've spent over the last two or three years where I've found that I needed to push myself and find myself – my inner self – rather than things like falling in love with someone else. I just really wanted to spend time with myself in order to be ready for the world in a way; to teach myself things, to learn a lot, to study. Just trying to find my inner soul; that's what I'm doing with [these] lyrics. We're still going on that whole ambitious feel that we've always had; our message is to do something with your life, but it's entirely up to you what you make out of [it]. That's the whole message behind the band really, and this is what we've done in Loveless again.

“[It's] such a sterile title, it's so straightforward in a way,” Gadacz ponders. “It could be seen as something not as positive, but the outcome of the songs really are positive messages and they really are [full of] information that people will probably get a lot out of. A lot of people, when they are alone or when they feel lonely it's straightaway like a bad thing, like you feel like you're left behind. But that's not really what I was going with that – I actually chose to feel that way because it would make me realise a lot about relationships in general and human beings, and that's what I talk about in the lyrics. Finding ways for all of us to work together rather than work against each other in the world. I've tried to just have my own perspective on that and hopefully it will open a lot of people's eyes to that and maybe they'll get something out of it – that's the ultimate goal.”