Life Happens In Seasons, Explains Bayside's Anthony Raneri

“It's the last day of tour so I’m just doing some laundry,” Bayside frontman Anthony Raneri begins, crossing off chores – including Aussie tour promo – from his list. It’s a mundane task – the washing, hopefully not chatting with yours truly – and one that reminds fans that their favourite musicians are people just like them.

A lot of the time, the great art they produce comes at a price or is documenting an emotional time, and for Raneri, the two years since Cult dropped have been a rollercoaster to say the least. The vocalist found himself living out of a Tennessee motel, which is where he wrote the majority of the band’s new record, Vacancy. It’s also the same building featured on the album cover.

"I didn't want it to be a break-up record; I wanted it to be about how I was feeling in the aftermath and what I was going through."

“I wasn't trying to be clever or depressing, or inspiring or anything, really,” he explains. “I think the record for me was more of a journal than anything else. I wasn't writing for the listener, I was just writing my inner monologue.

“I didn't want it to be a break-up record; I wanted it to be about how I was feeling in the aftermath and what I was going through, and the guiding characteristic of it was isolation.”

As with any Bayside record, the riffs soar and infectious harmonies are tight, but at first glance – with the context in which it was written – it might comes across as somewhat of a depressing album, with song titles I’ve Been Dead All Day, Pretty Vacant, Enemy Lines and more, which is perhaps why they chose to round things out with It's Not As Depressing As It Sounds. Seven albums in and Raneri is has noticed a pattern. “I guess the older I get as a person, regardless of being a musician or a writer, I realise that life happens in seasons,” he tells. “There are great seasons and bad seasons, but they all pass. I think when I wrote this album I was conscious of the fact that it was a bad season, but I was really aware of the fact that one day it would just be something that happened to me that I once thought about.”

With so many records, it’s surprising their upcoming Aussie tour will be their first headline stint around the country, previously only gracing festival stages. “We're seven records in, so a half-hour festival set is like eight songs - hard to cover seven records in eight songs. We just play all our singles.”

And hits like Devotion And Desire, Don’t Call Me Peanut, and The Ghost Of St Valentine only scratch the surface of what the band have achieved since forming in 2000. “When we first started making records, we just wanted to be a band with longevity,” he says. “We wanted to be the band that people listened to in their teenage years into their adult years and were never embarrassed to still listen to us, and even turn their kids onto our band. And now that's all coming true, it's something we're especially proud of.”