Assteroid Walk Us Through The Inspirations Of Their '90s-Influenced Self-Titled EP

When it comes to bands who have a love for the nostalgia of ‘90s rock, but with a fun, progressive lean, it’s hard to look past the likes of Naarm/Melbourne quartet Assteroid.

Fun, quirky, and quick to deliver a well-written piece of fuzzy alt rock and pop, they’re a group who certainly commands your attention, whether it be from their slick compositions or their unifying live shows.

Having launched the project with music in 2022, the band returned with the likes of Butterfly Hair Clip and Hyundai Excel last year, with both tracks appearing on their debut, self-titled EP, which arrives today, May 16th.

Like the band themselves, the EP is a celebration of their influences, ranging from the hard-rocking, to the fun, and even to the classic pop sensibilities (especially seen on their cover of All Saints’ Pure Shores which closes the set).

To celebrate the release of their EP, the group will also be playing a free show with The Pearlies at The Gem in Collingwood on Saturday, May 24th.

But to celebrate the EP in a much more immediate fashion, Assteroid’s Anny Biagioni interviewed Penny Walker-Keefe to craft a track-by-track walkthrough of the six-song collection to gain a deeper understanding of how it came to be, and all the myriad inspirations that went into it.

1. Butterfly Hair Clip

We released this track as a single late last year. It’s a nostalgia trip about being a tween at the turn of the millennium. When I was in the zone of writing songs about fun stuff. This one goes out to my mum, who took me on late-‘90s shopping adventures to Highpoint with our little bit of pocket money to buy stickers and Lip Smackers, before I started going out solo to schlep around the mall and cinema with friends. Back when we remembered our friends’ landline home phone numbers. 

One time, when we played this song at the end of a set at the Old Bar, the bar staff immediately followed it up with playing Veruca Salt over the house music PA. They understood the assignment. 

2. Someone New

This song was written aaaages ago, when I was making solo guitar pop in my sharehouse bedroom. I wrote this song in about 2017, it’s one from the vault; and oldie but a goodie. We had a refined demo of it online but our producer Alex Brittan convinced us it was worthy of a glow up. 

“Can you give us an insight into the experience of writing Someone New?” asks Anny. “It feels… pretty close to the heart.”

Yeah, I think it was pretty fresh after seeing an ex who I’d broken up with six months earlier. I was in my Fine Arts degree, being musical, carving out creative time, and I just churned this one out because I was so in the space for it. It’s really just narrative-based – I had seen this guy because I wanted to give him back his debauched stuff that had lived under my bed that I didn’t want to deal with anymore.

Then when I got home, I worked on the song. The song is basically ‘I am trying to move on with my life, but you’re making it difficult, so here’s a bag of your shit.’ I can’t really remember how I felt writing it, but I’m appreciative of it now, because the list in Someone New is so specific and I’m glad to have reclaimed some of those things by writing them into a song!

3. Montague St Bridge

This track is about being broke while trying to make it as a visual artist. The track features a relentless, driving bass riff and lots of contrasting guitars and fun harmonies. We used different guitar tones to tell a narrative that teeters between tough and vulnerable. 

I was listening to lots of Rage Against The Machine when I wrote the main guitar riffs. We had fun doing big shouty group vocals at the end. I somehow managed to pull off rhyming fridge with bridge in a song. Whatever works, right? This is our new single that represents the EP, and we’re gonna try and make a video for it.

4. Hyundai Excel

An ode to my first long term car. She was yellow. We had many adventures together such as accidental off-road country driving, and crossing the Nullarbor. Writing this song marked a turning point, where I decided I wanted to play in a fun band who had mostly fun songs. No moping around here. 

I remember writing it and thinking, how can I make it weirder? I wanted to get riffy. It has this surfy instrumental bridge that’s super fun to play, feels like if the Beach Boys were petrol heads. 

Secretly really hoping Hyundai hears it, does an updated release of the Excel, asks me to choose the new colours and pays us to use the song for their ad.

5. Spaceship

Anny asked me when I was going to write an actual song about space to match our silly band name. So I wrote this one, like my take on Rocket Man, inspired by the shift of space travel from NASA and science, to rich dudes doing space tourism. 

When we play this one, we put sunglasses on. You know, so the sun doesn’t burn our eyes on the trip to space. 

It’s almost shoegaze, it’s atmospheric; dirty delay on the lead guitar feels a bit psychedelic. We switch from ethereal to gritty guitar tones throughout the song. Someone at a gig likened us to Queens Of The Stone Age with this one and we loved that. 

6. Pure Shores

This is my favourite Y2K pop song. It was written and performed by girl group All Saints and used in the soundtrack for Danny Boyle’s film The Beach. It’s gorgeous. I still love listening to it. So, it was a dream to do an indie pop cover of the song with atmospheric guitars and girl gang vocal harmonies up the wazoo. Our producer Alex heard us play this live and convinced us to record it and chuck it on the EP. We think he did a pretty good job of its production. 

Assteroid’s self-titled EP is out now.