Age Champion On Instantly Knowing A Song's A Ripper

According to drummer Scott Byron, Age Champion "got together in 2015 to help record some demo tracks for a friend studying sound engineering. We wrote four songs in our first practice and have been playing together ever since".

There are more memorable origin stories out there. No one told them they had Chosen One status on their 15th birthdays and maybe they never felt the pinch of a radioactive spider, but from these humble beginnings they've grown into an outfit wielding the burgeoning live ferocity of predecessors like The Vines, The Hives and Queens Of The Stone Age. That 'stage-first' mentality has shaped their new EP Coming Of Age, although "the excitement of making a hard-hitting rock record kept us hungry," as Byron tells it.

"All the tracks were born and grew through performing live," says Byron. "We'd play heaps of gigs and every time we'd play the tracks they'd grow in some way. Having a live audience also helped develop the songs because we could feel the reaction and vibe of the punters and adapt accordingly."

Aptly titled, Coming Of Age has a wider "running theme of living and growing up as a millennial in Australia, finding your way and everything that goes with that". But it is also a document of their own progress, from genesis to sonic maturity. "Get Up is special because we wrote it in our first ever practice," Byron explains of one of the songs on the EP. "It was pretty bare-bones and it's just grown into this massive track. Conversely, Ivy League was sick because we wrote and decided to record it at the 11th hour; we just instantly knew it was a ripper."