New Ma's On The Block

DMA's released their first single, Delete, complete with video clip from director, Mitch Grant, on 16 Feb. The single, recorded DIY in lyricist and guitarist Johnny Took's bedroom, has been praised by the Australian music press since, with excitement mounting for the release of their debut self-titled and -produced EP. The next day I Oh You announced the signing, adding DMA's to a fledgling label that also boasts the likes of Violent Soho and DZ Deathrays.

The group were not flustered. “I tried my best to not get excited about it, because we've got to be in this game for the long haul, you know, the next 30 or 40 years, so there's no point getting overly excited,” says Took, who also plays in Little Bastard. “The main thing that we've got to do is keep writing good songs, and I know that we've got the songs to back it up, and are gonna write better songs as well.”

It's a humble stance from a group that've been generating hype since they released single Play It Out as Dirty Ma's late last year. The single and accompanying video have since been taken offline. “It got to a point that we'd been writing for a couple of years and we decided that we actually wanted to make something happen just to see what people thought about it. So we got our mate Mitch Grant on board, he did the Delete clip, and so we worked on a clip with him for Play It Out… The day that we put it out we got a call from Leon [Rogovoy] who's our manager now, from Falcona. I was pretty hesitant to show him anything. He kept bugging me in emails, and our [touring] guitarist at the moment, Peter Harrowsmith, was friends with him and said he was a good guy. So I was like, 'Alright, I'll show him a couple more of the demos we've done'.”

Don't expect to see Johnny Took, and singers Matt Mason and Tommy O, slugging it out on the Sydney live scene. They're a self-described “studio band”, admits Took. “We're going to be pretty picky I reckon with some of the gigs that we do. When we started this band we didn't want to be one of those Sydney bands that is just in the shitfight of the Sydney scene, like playing World Bar at 1am.”

“We just want to skip that and get to the mad shit straight away,” adds Mason. The plan is to “let the tunes do the talking and focus on writing instead of putting a live set together. We've all done those gigs before, we know it doesn't really work,” Took says. “You're better off staying at home for the couple of hours that you'd be out and trying to write a better song. A good song is more likely to get you places than a good show,” Mason concludes.