Drowning Out The Buzz

Loon Lake rocketed into the spotlight on the strength of their 2011 EP, Not Just Friends. Barely a year old, the band went into high rotation on triple j, RRR and FBi with the infectious garage pop tunes Easy Chairs and In The Summer. There was a flash of brilliance there, a rough and ready exuberance. From nowhere, they were suddenly everywhere. In 12 short months, Loon Lake had released a follow up EP, Thirty Three, spawned the indie hit Cherry Lips and toured mercilessly, quickly escalating through support slots and headline club shows to appearances at major festivals. For this band of brothers (Sam, his biological siblings Simon and Nick, and honorary siblings Tim Lowe and Dan Bull), it was a breathless, intoxicating climb. “I remember the first time we were played on triple j, it was a real buzz,” Nolan says. “[And] I guess the more things that happen, the more you want it. People were taking us seriously so we had to too, so we kept raising the bar for ourselves.”

By the time they came to record a full-length, Loon Lake had already started to evolve away from their signature sound. There was a feeling amongst the band members that the sugary insta-pop that had paved their way to success wasn't substantial enough; the boys wanted to sink their teeth into something more challenging. As chief songwriter, Nolan struggled initially to meet their expectations. “We went to Bali on a surf trip in April and I wrote some stuff there. I took MIDI keyboards and a laptop and wrote loads of stuff, but the boys just weren't taking it. It was probably too shiny and catchy, loads of stuff in the vein of Cherry Lips, but it wasn't what they wanted.”

Nolan was crippled by the stress, but his brothers told him to lighten up. Move faster, they advised, don't labour on things. He responded by putting his guitar down altogether. Instead of writing, Nolan listened, drowning himself in pop music: Florence & The Machine, Frank Ocean, Rudimental, Rihanna. He also watched BBC songwriting lectures by Mark Ronson and Calvin Harris. Somewhere in the process, he found his voice again.

In late May, the band rented a house in the Victorian coastal town of Johanna to see what kind of album was taking shape. “We decided that it was time to get away from everyone and take every single idea that we had in our computers and work through them,” Nolan explains. “Every idea that was good went up onto this blackboard, then we nutted out the tracks and improved them. It was great because we got rid of heaps of crap and we realised that we had some great ideas.” The ten-day working vacation was a huge restorative for the guys, who had reached the point where the thought of hitting a rehearsal room in Melbourne was nothing but a drag. “We surfed, we ate well and played all night... We had to find a way to get the buzz again and it worked, we just had a ball. Everything just fell in place.”

Three months later and Loon Lake's debut album is ready to hit the shelves. Called Gloamer, it is both a first step and a mature step forward for the band: dynamic, reflective and surprisingly textured. This is still a garage pop band, but the boys have stretched their wings a little, adding synth keys and the odd electro inflection to their sound. “We just want to be like everyone else,” Nolan jokes. “I think it's tastefully done. We didn't want to end up sounding like those triple j bands with the mad synth lines and everything, but instead of thinking that we couldn't use synth because we're a guitar band, we just forgot about the rules. Even if we wanted to program beats, if it sounded good it, it was going in. Honestly, I was worried about losing fans at the start. I thought it was arrogant to completely change, but the guys were like, 'it's good stuff, believe in it'. And they were right.”