Stillwater Temple

Speaking on a Sunday afternoon, Stillwater Giants' Tom Godden comes across as a charming and earthly fellow. “My old man taught both me and Henry [Clarke, vocals] guitar,” he says in a warm, lackadaisically West Australian lilt. “My dad's the guitar teacher at the school down in Margaret River, and we learnt how to play from him.”

Godden is Stillwaters' lead guitarist; the centre of the guitar-anchored melodies distinctive of the West Australian foursome's sound. Each band member – besides Godden, there's Angus Watkins, Kyle Lockyer, and Henry Clarke – hails from Margaret River; and the sun and the sea and the nonchalance of the coastal town are as much an element of their laid-back pop rock as the guitar and tenor vocals. Like many other impressive Australian exports, Stillwater very much incorporate their locality into their sound: it's music that seems as comfortable perhaps on-stage at a pub on William Street as it does on triple j during peak hour.

“I'd been playing music with Henry through the music program at high school for years; I'm a bit older than the other guys, and so after I finished school I went travelling for quite a while,” Godden explains. “But then when I got back, I met up with Henry and we started playing some music and he knew Angus the drummer, and we had a couple of jams down south. Then Angus had a friend Kyle, who's a bass player, and the band sort of formed down south through holiday jams, but we're all based in Perth now.”

Stillwater's music videos have production values and ambition that certainly push beyond the pocket money most bands get during their start-up. Taken from their eponymous debut, Give Into Me's clip has the four jamming in a pool underwater. Like, literally, underneath water. “The night before we filmed it, we still had to come up with the concept for the film clip,” Godden confesses. “I was living in a house in Swanbourne, a sharehouse with a pool, and we arranged to have a meeting at my place at 10 o'clock the night before to have a talk about pre-production. We all met around the pool, and we were drinking a few beers, when someone walked over and said, 'Why don't we just do it underwater' as a joke. But everyone took it seriously, so we stuck with it.” How it felt to spend twenty minutes submerged, with guitar, underwater? “I'm pretty used to it,” Godden rationalizes with a laugh. “I've done a lot of surfing. It was just like being dumped.”

The video for single Not Like The Others from Stillwater's upcoming Fly Under the Radar EP shares this ambition: the Stillwater gents pick up a cute hitchhiker, and the video gives us four different visualizations of what happens next. One of them ends up in bondage gear. “Whenever we come up with film clips, we all sit around and have a beer and barbecue,” Godden details. “When you listen to that song, it kind of feels like being in a car on a roadtrip. So the idea evolved from that, and then of course, we like having a pretty girl in our clips.” An understandable rationalisation.

With Fly Under The Radar due for launch this weekend, Godden believes the band has had more time to develop its sound. “The first EP was a lot more raw, it had a lot more rock'n'roll roots. It was just the way we were at that time,” he says, tacitly. “The new EP is definitely less rock'n'roll, but a lot more polished. What's the word... more ambient? More of a conceptual journey. We're really proud of it, and pretty stoked.”