EXCLUSIVE: Listen To Tex Perkins & The Fat Rubber Band's Debut Self Titled Album

Elusive chameleon of the Ausmusic landscape Tex Perkins has burst back onto the scene fronting a brand new project with swamp-blues juggernauts The Fat Rubber Band.

Coming together with a brand new self titled release, the group are premiering their album right here with The Music.

“We wanted it to sound rural, to feel the dirt and the grass and the leaves," Perkins said of the new music. A passion project between himself and multi-instrumentalist Matt Walker, the band came together through a mutual love of iconic Americana blues legend Link Wray.

"There’s a couple of albums he recorded in a chicken shack on his brother Vernon’s farm, known as the Three Track Shack recordings - one was a self-titled album and the follow-up called Beans and Fatback, which is a little more rare," Perkins explained.

"My partner Kristyna knew I was a fan of that record and she's an eBay ninja and she found a vinyl copy. After I immediately hugged and thanked her for it, I took a picture of it and sent it to Matt Walker. And the fateful words came back: 'Awesome, let's make an album like that.' And that was it. We were on!”

The singer continued, "another aspect that we wanted was for the sound to be sometimes a collision and sometimes a marriage of acoustic and electric instruments. We wanted that tension between mandolins and bouzoukis meeting fuzz guitars. We also considered percussion to be a vital element of the sound we were going for; we noticed in the recordings we loved from the 50s and 60s that often the tambourine hit, or the maracas, or whatever percussion, was right up there in the mix, right next to the vocal."

Perkins went on, “the last characteristic of the music we wanted to pursue was harmonies, vocal harmonies. Not only have Matt and I discovered we can weave instinctively around each other’s singing, really well, we also have three other great vocalists in the group, so five part harmonies is what we end up with on songs like Love Long Gone and Trouble Goodbye, it can be breath-taking…literally.”

Check out new music from Tex Perkins & The Fat Rubber Band via the player above.