First Steps

Putting together a debut release tends to be as daunting as it is exciting. For this group of young men, these feelings are amplified, given the relationship of the members and the newness of the band. “We started playing music a while ago – myself, two brothers and a mate. We officially launched Valdaway early last year. We've all grown up together and practically live together. It's pretty... interesting, really!” he laughs. “The album's been in the works for a while; we recorded it last year and we're releasing it in March. We were really enjoying playing live and it just felt like the right time to get some tracks down and really push something out. We could've released it late last year some time but we wanted to avoid the Christmas rush and line up a heap of shows around it.”

Such is the chaos of growing up with two brothers, that building the songs seemed to happen in a manner the group members were very much used to. “Our songwriting process is practically just smashing out the jams. We all collaborate on the songwriting – we're lucky really because we're all brothers. If we have a disagreement we tend to get over it pretty quickly because we've argued about lots of things for years.” Jamming it out poses its own threats, however, as the gentlemen quickly realised, they had too many songs to work with. “It became difficult because we have quite a few tracks,” Grogan chuckles. “We narrowed it down from about 20 to ten, then did demo recordings of them and then decided which ones we wanted to keep developing.”

Enter Dave Parkin. The renowned producer, who has worked with the likes of Karnivool, Jebediah and Sons Of Rico, joined in assisting the band alongside Leon Zervos (Muse, Tame Impala, INXS), who mastered the record. Parkin's help with production and engineering had the band feeling confident and happy. Grogan explains what was great about working with Parkin. “It was awesome”, Grogan sighs. “He has a similar sense of humour to us so we had a great time working with him. Every other time we've worked on projects, from my experience anyway, it's just been a really stressful thing and never really very enjoyable until meeting Parko. He added some stuff like making parts of our songs shorter and adding different tones and guitar lines that we wouldn't have used otherwise, and we all just got along like a big group of mates.”

The locals are now feeling ready and rearing to launch the record and those going along to the show should expect a huge party. “We're definitely playing at least an hour-long set and we're going to play every song from the EP. We've got some great bands on the bill like Indigo, and Black Water Station have been good mates with us for years, so it's just gonna be a big party and we're all going to have a really good time.”