Third Time's A Charm

When Helm burst onto the scene back in 2008, the band quickly made an impression of Australian alt-rock fans. Then, after two excellent records and plenty of live triumphs, Helm seemed to disappear last year. According to vocalist/guitarist Lucas Stone, the band were going through their toughest times, but that grew to feel creatively liberating.

“Going into 2012 that was probably our hardest year, our touring really dived off and we had a bit of hard financial times. But the songs started coming together through that period. Then Matty and Scotty had to leave because of family pressures so we had to get some new guys in. After all that we really just wanted to do whatever we wanted. So we wrote until we were happy and [when] recording came it was really relaxed. For us, this break was about reassembling the line-up and just dealing with life, so that we could make an album that justifies what we wanted to as musicians. And we've been able to put together an album that's 100 per cent what we wanted to do. No fuckin' compromises.”

The freedom that Stone and the revitalised Helm found on Volume III… Panthalassa has the band exploring trippy and ethereal textures while pushing the heavier aspects found on their first two records to their logical and satisfying extremes. And, despite the fact Stone feels the band dramas from last year in part stemmed from an inability to fit into a genre, the band's latest record defies neat categorisation.

“It's hard living in a crossover genre like we do. There's a lot of melodies but there's also a lot of heaviness. And when sit in the middle there's a tendency to get left behind. I think these days that's starting to change a bit – the whole [range of] progressive genres are becoming more popular – but when you blur the genre lines [it can be hard]. So [for this album] it was about really trying to cement a foundation of quality songs. This whole album has been getting back to being musos and doing what we love. There's been no goals in mind. Coming out of Volume II we did have our sights set on certain things, and it just kind of backfires. With this one, there was nothing but a focus on the quality of the songs.”

Now the band's about to venture out on an album headline tour, Stone promises that fans are going to experience all the attention to detail the band invested in Volume III. “We're going to play this record from start to finish, so people are going to get exactly what they've paid for… And if they're not too bored after that we might do some older stuff at the end.”