An Excellent Adventure

Given all that they've achieved in their brief career, it's staggering to contemplate that Brisbane's Dune Rats are only now on the verge of releasing their debut album. On the back of three independent EPs and a couple of singles they've not only toured Australia extensively but already done stints in the USA, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and even China.

They would have added Vietnam to that list as well but were denied entry – purportedly after officials caught wind of their bong-smoking heroics in the Red Light Green Light film-clip – but that blemish hasn't even slightly derailed their justifiable pride in their achievements to date.

“We're so fortunate to be an Aussie band doing it DIY for so long, and now we've got our own label imprint, but we feel that we've done it on our own fucking terms and our own business skills and didn't really bag any cunt out – it works for you,” marvels guitarist/vocalist Danny Beusa.

“We've just come back from the States and it was a really fucking fun two months – that's a big bitch the States so you can't really expect to make inroads too soon, but we frothed when we were in Hawaii and a couple of people stopped us in the street. It weirds us out just when people overseas order T-shirts and stuff, like some cunt in Ireland will buy something and it's like, 'How the fuck do they even know about us?' And South Africa was crazy – it just blew our fucking brains being in Capetown for our first headlining show and there were 600 people there!

“For us we literally thought it would be a funny excuse to see some places. We thought if we ever got a manager – which we do now – that they wouldn't be down with it, so we just decided to travel to as many places as we could with the band money that we'd saved from live shows. It was so fucking worth it, and it ended up working for us because people actually liked our music in the countries we went to and when we came home people actually respected us for going to those countries. We were really lucky.”

And while Dune Rats' distinctive band of infectious punk is ludicrously catchy, it's still bizarre where it's taken them in such a short time.

“China was fucking crazy, dude!” Beusa continues. “We went right to the Mongol border so we didn't really stick to the normal tourist spots – we didn't go to Hong Kong or Shangahi, the normal fucking places people go to, but we went to Xinxiang, Xi'an and Chengdu, places where they look at you, like, 'Why the fuck is there a white dude with long hair and tattoos in my country town?' But they were sick – they'd smile at you and feed you, it was so good.

“That's why for us going back to LA was like culture shock – we almost got anxiety about going back into the American storm when you're so used to a different culture. We're so fucking lucky, we get to pick the best bits out of every culture and appreciate what we're doing massively – I guess that's why we're always happy!”

Now the trio are about to get even happier with the release of Dune Rats, a batch of all-new originals which expands their horizons without straying too far from what made their early music so great.

“It was kinda weird, the last EP we wrote [2013's Smile] we were just getting used to the idea of people thinking we were a band,” Beusa laughs. “With the first two EPs we were pretty happy just flying under the radar and having people think we were nothing – just two really shit cunts just jamming around – but by the third EP we'd played in America [and people were noticing]. So when we decided that we were going to make an album and that these were the songs that we were going to be playing [for a] year-and-a-half or two years – hopefully even longer than that – we just sort of thought, 'Fuck it! We'd rather write songs that we want to play!' 

“People were saying, 'Oh, you should write an album that's got slower songs and faster songs' and all that sorta shit, but we went, 'Fuck it!' and just wrote whatever songs we wanted, including some ones that are pretty different to what we've done before. We knew that whatever we did would end up sounding like us anyway, so we were pretty happy just to lock ourselves in a shed for a month or two and just smoke weed and write whatever came out. It was a fucking cracker.”