Cracked Beauty

Adrian Hoffmann has long been obsessed with the music of previous generations - particularly seminal '80s Australian rock - but the title of sophomore album Amberola reaches further back. “Amberola - it's like an old record player from the 1900s,” Hoffmann explains. “It's a blue cylinder that goes over this metal thing; you wind it up and a needle goes through the grooves. They couldn't sustain them though because they kept cracking.”

On tour, the six friends from Western Australia stumbled on the image during a visit to a heritage cottage. “There was a school excursion on at the same time, and the teacher was like, 'Don't touch anything!'. There was this object in the corner of one of the rooms and of course one of the kids started playing with it, mucking around with it, and he got it working. So we heard this amazing music from 1911. We were all just going, 'What is this?'”

“The teacher was really embarrassed, and going to kill the kid basically, and the tour guide was like, 'Wow, no, seriously, we've been trying to get that working for years'. Everyone just sat around it listening. I recorded it on my iPhone, but you can't really hear it. Then we found out it was called an amberola, and it's just such a beautiful word.”

The story is equally redolent, however, of Hoffmann's confident preciousness and a literal being in-the-right-room-at-the-right-time that kicked things off for the band. A trip to Sydney as a 17-year-old to see heroes The Triffids play ended in Hoffmann being up on stage a few months later to sing with them at their PIAF tribute show, and was the connection that brought Brian Jonestown Massacre guitarist and renowned producer Ricky Maymi into Hoffmann's orbit - he later toured as bassist for Maymi and Steve Kilbey's David Neil project.

“I was 17 when I flew over to see The Triffids reunion show. I was obsessed with them. Afterwards I got in touch with one of the guitarists from the show and just said, 'Wow, I loved the show', and he became really interested in me because I was a young kid from Perth that liked this band from the '80s. So when they came to Perth I got a phone call saying, 'We want you to come up and sing a song with us', which was amazing for me. And yeah, I met Ricky there.”

Despite a dream run for the band so far Hoffmann says Amberola holds a sense of longing. “Lyrically there's this story of the constant struggle of reaching for something that you think is there but that's not there. There's no end to the story, it's just always this yearning for something that can't be reached, but you don't realise that it can't be.”