Location, Location, Location

"Long,” is the first thing Matt Mondanile says as we sit down for a beer during his brief stop in Australia. He says it with a sigh that can only come from jetlag. “It's about a 20-hour flight from LA. I mean it's fine, but it can really take it out of you when you travel that long and get here and have so much stuff to do in a short period of time.”

Mondanile is currently over here as Ducktails, his solo moniker apart from the arguably more well known Real Estate. Doubling on Julia Holter's national bill is a bit of an aside. “She's a friend of mine, actually. It'll be our first show tonight, which is pretty exciting. We've been friends for a while and have always followed each other's careers and stuff, so it'll be fun to get out there and play this show with her. I fly out again tomorrow, over to Sydney and then Melbourne, so we won't get any time to stop. I've got these interviews and then the sound check, and then we fly out straight again tomorrow. So yeah, hectic.”

He's somehow finding time to slot international jetsetting in between the release of Real Estate's third album, the appropriately named Atlas. In form with Mondanile's current movements, the album revolves around a sense of place – both finding, and at times losing, where you belong. Martin [Courtney] was writing the majority of the songs over the course of a year, and then we got together to flesh it out and make something out of it. It was one of the more collaborative projects we've done, because we wrote a lot of the guitar parts together. Once we got into the studio, we tracked it in about two weeks. It was the quickest we've ever recorded a record. We were really prepared going in, so we tracked it live for the most part. That was something new for us, because in the past the songs would be written almost while we were recording. So we kept all those live takes, and I think that lends itself a lot to what we were trying to do with the album.”

What they were trying to do with Atlas is capture the ennui that comes from being displaced, especially when your career does revolve around touring. “Martin was writing the lyrics about what was happening in his life, whereas before he was writing a lot about the past and all these nostalgic ideas,” Mondanile says. “He's married now, so he's writing about the fact he hast to cope with that settled life and providing for a family while still trying to have a career which requires you to do a lot of travelling and moving around. That's what the lyrics are about: just the anxiety of dealing with that.”

Mondanile is taking this time to relax – if only slightly – before Atlas is taken around the world. “It's awesome, it's like summer camp,” he laughs. “From Australia we have all of Europe, so I'm just trying to get some sun before we're on our feet for months.”