How Mosman Alder Recovered From Their 'Broken' First EP

"The EP was really broken,” Muir says with a tinge of disappointment in his voice when describing the band’s first effort. “It was two days here, two days there, and all this bad shit happened, like there was floods, and the studio needed repairs, so it was really jolted. We never felt like we could get any momentum on it. With this record though, everything was so streamlined, it was great.”

After the hassle getting that first EP – titled Burn Bright – together, Muir and the five other members of the band wanted to make sure work on their next record ran smoothly. Of course, having invested hours working with each other certainly helps, and this time around the group had the luxury of choosing quality over quantity. “Things have definitely changed [this time], I think you can tell pretty easily by listening to both records. Burn Bright had pretty much the first songs we ever wrote on it. This time, we wrote about 40 tracks and broke it down to 11, so there was a lot of learning and developing, and even in the album there’s shifts towards where we’re planning on going. Paul Dempsey was the coolest dude ever and as it turns out he’s a really good producer too [laughs]. I learned a lot from him. He’s a guitarist and singer and I’m a guitarist and singer so he taught me a few guitar moves and vocal moves – I got a few crash courses with him, so that was good.”

"The EP was really broken."

The new full-length is titled Humdrum Star, a phrase pulled from a famous Carl Sagan quote. “I can never recite the full thing because I don’t have the world’s best memory,” Muir chuckles when queried about it, “but it’s basically saying within the grand scheme of the universe, our sun’s pretty small and our planet’s just one little planet, the ‘humdrum star’. It’s one of those things – no matter how big your problems seem, we’re just a little speck in the grand scheme of things. That kind of idea of a sublime experience – something being too big for our comprehension – it’s something that transcends and we’re really into that sort of stuff.”

Muir and the band have been steadily releasing exclusive behind the scenes footage of their work on the record via Facebook, and the response has been positive. “We have this friend Kate O’Sullivan and she’s really good with a camera. I got this idea, like, I’d been wanting to do it anyway, just document everything. You never know when you’re going to use it and what’s gonna happen. There’ll be more parts coming out, there’s about four or five, so she just hung around and helped us out.”