Coattail Riders

With two EPs released over their four-year history, Greenthief have been putting in the hard yards in the run-up to their debut album release in 2013, kicking the year off with an east coast tour for first single Epidemic, followed by a 23-date autumn tour opening for melodic heavy rock legends The Butterfly Effect.

“It was awesome,” recalls frontman Julian Schweitzer. “It was a really great opportunity we had to be able to ride on the back of a really well-established band. We had a ball getting to play really big venues and getting a little look into the life of a bigger band and having everything organised for us and stuff like that, so it was a really awesome experience.

“At the back of that tour we went straight back into the rehearsal room... because we'd planned to start recording quite soon after that, which is really good timing because we had to do a lot of playing and tidying up. It was definitely inspiring and we felt really motivated to get back into it at the end of the tour,” he admits of the kick of encouragement that comes with touring with such a high-profile band.

With a European tour in the works for next year as well, the psych-rock trio jumped headlong into work for their debut album.

“I guess there were two ways of putting together the album,” Schweitzer considers. “One was to try and make it more of an album that has ups and downs and shades [which] a band like Tame Impala has obviously done so well, like just created a really amazing thing that goes for 45 minutes or whatever. The other approach we were considering was, 'Do we want to just put all of our best songs, put on more of the shorter songs, and think of it as twelve singles?' And so we were tossing up between the two different ways of going about it, and we're going for more the song element rather than like an album thing, but we're hoping it all works together.”

Holing up in a Mullumbimby forest studio to track the album and complete the singles, Greenthief enlisted the help of a renowned producer.

“Steve James [Sex Pistols, The Jam] who did the [2011] Retribution EP, he's kind of doing the album, and he's been really good. In terms of what we've done with him, he came up for a weekend a couple of weekends before we went into the studio and he stayed the night at mine. We kind of went through all the songs and we just played them in the rehearsal room to him and we did a lot of pre-production that way. He's great – we worked with him in the past and he always brings a lot of advice, normally with just trimming the fat off the songs,” Schweitzer says.

With the recently dropped second single Mr Number 1 providing a further taste of the debut album to come, the trio scheduled another extensive tour including Western Australia, a territory that usually remains cost-prohibitive for a band in their formative stages.

“We were trying to follow up from The Butterfly Effect tour – we were trying to revisit the [same] places, and the dudes from The Butterfly Effect mentioned, 'You should really be coming back to these places as soon as possible if you're really serious about developing your fanbase', which is true – you can't really sit and wait for whatever it is that you're waiting to happen, because the only thing that you can do and control is your live show.”