Blank Realm Set To Premiere New Music At Sydney Festival

It’s been a pretty incredible year for Brisbane art-pop quartet Blank Realm. Having released Grassed Inn at the year’s onset, they spent 2014 delighting existing fans and winning over hordes of new followers with their strange yet ultra-accessible music and captivating live show.

Scoring brilliant reviews for Grassed Inn from all over the globe (the album’s already been nominated for the Australian Music Prize and the band for double j Artist Of The Year), they dominated Glastonbury, BIGSOUND and Blurst Of Times festivals and now have Meredith and Sydney Festival on their horizon.

“We’re really looking forward to Sydney Festival – we haven’t played many festival shows where we’re headlining, in terms of there’s no supports and we’re the band that people are there to see,” says vocalist/drummer Daniel Spencer. “We’re probably going to be airing some of the new songs that we’ve been working on for the next album as well – kind of like a world premiere.”

Are the new tunes far removed from the tone of Grassed Inn and 2012’s Go Easy? “I think it’ll be a bit heavier and maybe incorporating more electronic elements, which we started using a little bit on Grassed Inn,” Spencer reveals. “The other big change is that we’ll be going into a studio to record it this time, which we’ve never done before – all of our other albums have just been recorded by ourselves and mastered by ourselves with a bit of help. And there’ll be a set period of time set aside rather than just constantly recording – it’s actually going to be a ‘recording session’.

“I think it’ll be a bit heavier and maybe incorporating more electronic elements, which we started using a little bit on Grassed Inn.”

“We’ve definitely fallen in love with songwriting, and creating songs which are catchy and which become a part of people’s lives more than abstract material. But there’ll always be those experimental undercurrents to our music, and the songs that we’re writing now have a noisier element to them but are still hopefully catchy. Although we’ve been listening to a lot of bands like Christian Death and Coil so maybe that’s taking it in a bit of a darker direction. We’re also listening to a lot of Wire, but not the first three albums – we’re into the more ‘daggy’ stuff like The Ideal Copy (1987) and A Bell Is A Cup (1988), those albums which might inspire a bit more of a ‘strange-pop’ sound.”

And while they’re aiming to evolve, Spencer attests that the creative process itself won’t be changing anytime soon. “That’s one thing we’ll never change because it doesn’t work any other way,” he laughs. “Basically we all have to be in the room and start playing and if something’s good we’ll do it again or go back and listen to the tapes and decipher what was good in there. But it’s never one person writing a song or bringing in a riff or a lyric or anything – it always has to be all four of us in the room being spontaneous for it to work.”