Oh The Horror!

Miami Horror have been keeping busy since the runaway success of their debut Illumination in 2010. They've toured the US and moved home base to LA, where they've been hard at work on their sophomore record. But bassist/producer Ben Plant isn't feeling pressured. “I never really felt that much pressure or anything. The only thing that's confusing about this whole thing is that we've got a lot of fans internationally that are quite different to the fans in Australia or just the music audience in Australia,” Plant says. “So what we're trying to work out is what direction do we really take the album musically because the scene in Australia is quite different…”

It sounds as though he's trying to appease two very different crowds, with two very different musical sensibilities. “In Australia, they're a bit more stand-offish, and they're really into this kind of down-tempo or deeper sound, and deeper, darker. We enjoy that kind of music, and we listen to it a lot, and we DJ pretty much deep house, cue these sorta songs, and it's not far from what we're interested in, but it doesn't kind of relate too much to the last record. And at the moment, most of our fans from overseas are really into the last record and kind of expect something to sound a bit more like that, I think. And we're also trying to think what will last in the long term.”

But the crowds will be glad to see the boys back home on their upcoming national tour in support of their new single Real Slow. “Me and Aaron [Shanahan, guitar] were both going through intense relationships where we thought we were going to marry the person, so we're in this state of mind… We were doing long distance for half the time with these people, so we were happy taking everything slowly and just having a lot of confidence in the relationships that we had. Kind of gives you this idea that there's no rush because you're actually so in love with the person that nothing's going to come in the way… We kinda based the song idea around that.”

But they wont be Down Under for long as they head back America-way to play the shows they've got lined up for the summer. Plant says they made the initial shift to LA for a little bit of inspiration. “I had this idea in my head that I really wanted to live there for a little bit and I convinced everyone else, basically, and they were all into it, too. Just because it's such a weird place, how colourful it is, the characters, strange people, like the strangest people you'd find in the world and there's such a variety of them as well. And all these little things add up to give you ideas and inspiration that you can't really get from somewhere you're used to. But I should also add that we are pretty happy to be back in Australia.”