Diola: Wise Up.

Diola play the B Lounge, Dome Nightclub on Thursday and the Rose’n’Crown, Surfers Paradise on July 17.

It’s a classic Catch 22 situation. You’re in a band. You can’t get any decent gigs until you’ve done some recording, but you can’t afford to record until you can get some paid gigs. What do you do? Diola bit the bullet and went into the studio to put together some tracks as a demo to land some shows, and have come away with a five-track winner with the soon to be released Two Face EP.

“That was the main incentive to do the recording - to get gigs,” bassist Damien explains. “We were going out trying to get shows, because we really wanted to play as many places as we can. Basically you go in, and it’s the same story. Drop us in a demo and so forth. We never really had anything that had come out very well, and it was hard not hearing back from places. Now that it’s done people are taking us more seriously.”

As you’d hope they would with such a polished piece of work.

“We did the recording in the last two weeks of May. Basically the first week of June it was all done, and it’s just a matter of waiting for them to be pressed now. You learn a lot about the way you play because it’s so exacting. It was really all about getting some gigs. If we sell a few copies along the way it’s just a bonus.”

Previously known as None The Wiser, Diola were finding previously that some of the gigs they were being offered didn’t exactly fit their layered, angsty and intelligent metallic rock style.

“It sort of didn’t really fit. It was kind of a happier sort of punk thing. It didn’t fit the style of our music. We were actually getting some offers for punk gigs, and our music doesn’t go over too well at punk shows,” he jokes. “Diola just came in. It’s not really a word of anything. It started out as Avoid spelt backwards, which was Diova, but it didn’t really sound good. Diola just sounded right. That’ll do it.”

Damien was the last member into the current Diola line up, and the tracks on the forthcoming disc have been put together in the year since he joined.

“We’re still playing a couple of old songs from before I joined, but with the band now everyone has equal input. We’re writing more as a group than individually. There’s a lot of progess from what the style was initially. We’re adding in a lot of different things as well. Like on the disc there’s some didgeridoo on there. We’re wanting a few different things in the music. Ben (guitars) has a friend that plays some didgeridoo; we tried it and it sounded really good.”

“I think basically before I joined it was more about individuals writing songs. When I joined we’ve been sitting down as four and writing songs. Everybody puts their own style into things. We are a band, and that’s how we want to do things. As a band.”