Tootin' A New Tune

In 2010 Melbourne-based quintet The Toot Toot Toots released their debut album Outlaws, which was well received across the nation and put the band on the map. Fast-forward to 2014, the band return with their sophomore album, Badlove – however, you'd be forgiven for not immediately realising it was the same group, as last year the group changed their name to Twin Beasts.

“We were working with a new producer for the album [Badlove], Burke Reid [The Drones] from America, and he was working at putting a lot of things into place for us to eventually travel over there, and we were getting a lot of negative feedback to the name The Toot Toot Toots,” says bass player Steve Gavan. “We originally came up with the name as a joke when we first started and we were never that fond of it anyway, so we decided that maybe with this new album and new sound it would be a good idea for a change.

“After going through probably about 200 suggestions of names, Twin Beasts was the one we all kind of landed on, essentially because our group is basically just five men just feeding off each other.”

With the new name in place, the boys set to work reinventing some of their previous material in order to create a cohesive style. “We felt we just wanted to try and modernise our music a bit I guess,” Gavan offers. “[In the past] we were listening to a lot of older musicians and trying to replicate that a bit too much, so in the process of reinventing our work we still wanted to use those influences, but to kind of bring out more of a modern sound while doing so.”

This fusion of old school storytelling with a modern twist is best realised on their album Badlove, a work which explores the many different facets of love the boys have experienced over the years: the good, the bad and the ugly. “We're very proud of [the album]. We feel like we've worked a lot harder to get the result this time around and we've had help from heaps of new people, so we feel like it's a dramatic step-up. My personal favourite track is probably Wicked Boys, which is about a bunch of young guys who have done something wrong and taken off on the run together. A lot of our old stuff is based on stories like that, and that's the kind of songwriting that I enjoy and relate to more.”

With the group currently on the road for their national tour promoting the album, Gavan reveals they're hoping to bring out even more new material. “We're hoping to put out a small EP after the tour, and do it ourselves to try have a go at recording something just on our own. We've already started working on some new material, but it really all depends on whether we will be able to afford to do it.”