Last DinosaursIn art, as in life, the relative success or failure of a particular venture invariably ends up being completely in the eye of the beholder.
Back in 2015 when Brisbane indie rockers Last Dinosaurs released their second album Wellness, the young four-piece had the world at their feet.
Years of hard work had built them a strong fanbase – both in their hometown and increasingly around the country – and their debut album In A Million Years (2012) had cracked the Top 10 on the Australian albums chart, peaking at #8, so the possibilities seemed endless.
Wellness was recorded down at The Grove Studios near Gosford with respected producer Scott Horcroft (Silverchair, Empire Of The Sun, The Presets).
Upon release it garnered strong reviews in the press, spawned a raft of catchy radio songs and ended up cracking the Australian Top 20 – topping out at #18, which while falling short of their debut in the success stakes, is still no mean feat – as well as being nominated for Album Of The Year at the Queensland Music Awards.
Fast forward ten years and Last Dinosaurs – by now a genuine international concern, having toured to all corners of the planet, racked up million of streams from all over the globe and played overseas shindigs such as Lollapalooza, Corona Capital and All Things Go – are completely re-recording their second album on their own terms, and along with five previously-unreleased songs are releasing back into the world as Wellnxss.
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The overall experience making Wellness the first time around taught them to trust their instincts, and now their instincts told them it was time for a second crack.
“I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to… not fix it, but make it sound the way I wanted it to sound,” explains founding member Sean Caskey, who co-fronts the band alongside his younger brother Lachlan. “Even if the results are technically inferior it's more true to how I heard it in my head all along.
“Even in the years afterwards – because I'd never really listened to it that much, but we played those songs for like ten years – my memory of those songs was a bit different to the actual recording, so it's quite lucky to be able to go back and tweak it a bit."
Despite being well supported by their label at the time, Dew Process, Caskey admits that the pressure of replicating their early success was difficult to deal with at such a young age.
“Oh, man,” he sighs. “Not that the label was pressuring us or anything in particular, but there's just an expectation, of course. And I completely understand it as well. But as far as we were concerned, the way it felt was like we missed the mark. The support really wasn't there for that second album.
“And it was kind of hard to deal with, honestly. And that's why it took us maybe another three years, again, before we did the third album [2018’s Yumeno Garden], which we did by ourselves, actually.
“Pressure is a good thing when it comes to writing,” he adds, “But back then we were just too young and inexperienced to be able to deal with it properly in a high pressure situation in an expensive studio and stuff.”
Caskey is at pains to point out that despite being displeased with the results of their original pass at Wellness, they still enjoyed the process of putting it together.
“It was good,” he remembers. “Scott was the mentor to the protégé JP [Jean-Paul Fung] who produced our first album, so in our minds we were stepping up to the pro. And he is an absolute weapon producer, and in some ways a genius as well.
“I really like Scott, but for some reason it just wasn't working perfectly for us. And after that experience, we realised that it doesn't matter about who you get or how good the chemistry may be, there's still quite a bit of luck involved in just making absolute bangers.
“But that aside though, we still kind of came away from it thinking, ‘Oh, it's a bit this, it's a bit that, I wish it could be a bit more like this and that’, but that's just what happens when you have an extreme budget but still a tight timeframe to bang out a lot of work.
“That's why these days we record ourselves at home in our home studios because time is not really a factor,” he adds. “Even though you don't spend a lot more time writing you can still spend the time just dialling the sounds in, and that's critical for us – even if the sounds aren't amazing, at least it sounds the way we wanted it to sound.”
Not many artists get to completely reimagine an existing piece of art, but the process of reinterpreting the songs on Wellness didn’t lead to any profound insight about their earlier work.
“I think we learned more just touring those songs for ten years,” Caskey smiles. “We didn't play most of those songs much, we kind of tucked that album away into obscured history for us. Like, we only play like Stream and Apollo and a few of the other ones every now and then.
“But re-recording it, the thing I learned the most was – because I did it myself – that I’ve definitely improved so much as a musician and – I guess, in a way – a producer and a mixer: that’s probably like the biggest takeaway. It’s, like, ‘Oh, I can actually do this stuff now’ – it only took like 15 years!
“But the songs have for the most part stayed the same – I've just injected little elements of the demos which people liked. But it's more a sonics thing and a delivery thing, my singing is just a million times better than what it used to be when I was younger.
“Because I was basically just an alcoholic when we were doing our first two or three albums. Now I approach music much, much more professionally – almost like it's athletics – and I sort of pride myself on my performance. Not that I'm an amazing singer, but I really try. Every single night we play, I really try my absolute best to sing the best I ever can.
“So coming off a tour and going into the studio, I feel like the vocal delivery is a million times better than what it was back then.”
Caskey explains that the five previously-unreleased songs on Wellnxss all hark back to the same period as the original album.
“Yeah, they’re from the same era-ish,” he continues. “They were just the only ones that I could find. I'm one of those idiots who doesn't do backups, so when I lose computers I lose sections of history. And in ten years I've lost a few, so I don't have photos and I don't have any audio recordings, but I just happened to have those lying around, from emails and stuff like that.
“I did have to redo those and finish them, but they were originally ones that just didn't quite fit or no one was really digging. Like Kebabs has been around for a long time – we’ve tried that on every album since and it just hasn't fit. But this time I was, like, ‘Alright, since it's like a b-side and there's not as much pressure, I'm just going to just drop it, just get it out there.
“It was good actually having them be b-sides because there's a lot less pressure on the song, so I could just let them be what they were going to be without having to feel like I needed them to sound like radio songs. I don't know if anyone even does that these days, think about radio songs – it’s more like social media songs.”
The singer tells that he didn’t have any problem stepping back into the mindset or sensibilities of his younger self, and could still associate properly with the version who wrote the songs on Wellness.
“Yeah, it still feels like my work,” he reflects. “I feel the lyrics on that album are pretty decent, especially the ones where me and [bassist Michael] Sloane wrote together, like Stream. I feel like that one still hits hard for people today. And [the title track] Wellness, I really like Wellness: for me, that probably most exemplifies the feeling that I had at the time, just falling in love again in a Brisbane summer, like that dreariness and sort of thinking about it like a mundane sort of thing.
“But there is one song, Evie, I just can't stand that song or the lyrics in particular. That one grinds my gears pretty hard, but people still like it. I've always hated it – always hated it. To me, it's just cheesy as hell.
“But, you know, for a lot of the biggest fans, that's their favourite song, and they always ask us to play it. And we'll play it like once every 15 tours, pretty much.”
Given the overall success that Last Dinosaurs have achieved it feels slightly strange that the band are looking back so critically upon an era of their output, but Caskey reckons that he’s still proud of what they’ve achieved in a broader sense.
“Sometimes I feel that, but it's definitely ongoing,” he ponders. “Sometimes I feel proud, but it's hard, though, because I'm a sucker for Instagram, and I'm just constantly seeing everybody else's success, which is so much more than us. And it always just feels like, ‘Oh, I wish we could be like that, I wish we could write songs like that, I wish we could be received like that’.
“But at the same time, I'm extremely grateful for the career we have. Especially these days with America, it's pretty much America that just opened the door for us. And forever America was the one place that everyone was, like, ‘No, don't even bother going there. It's going to be too hard, too competitive, too expensive’.
“But the first time we went, the shows just got completely blown out and sold out four times over in a day, so that really sort of just injected life into us. It’s, like, ‘Man, we can still do this thing!’ And then from there we got to do South America, also do Mexico, we've done Canada and a little bit more of Europe and stuff, on top of all the places we’d already been.
“So yeah, I'm not too proud, but I'm grateful, very grateful.
“Honestly, I would love to be able to join the dark side and do whatever it takes to be more successful, but we can't because we just don't have that bone in us. In a recent interview we were talking about making TikTok songs and I've tried – I'm always trying – but we just can't do it. It just ends up not sounding anything like what the objective was. I've given up. It's just how we sound. It's just the way it's going to be.”
The inevitable tour behind the new Wellnxss is a massive one for Last Dinosaurs, taking in more than 20 American cities before diverting through the UK and landing back in Australia for a headlining tour in the latter half of June.
“The thing I'm looking forward to most is the Australian tour,” Caskey enthuses. “We're bringing a band called Bad Suns – we supported them in America, probably 2023 or 2024, and they are just like the tightest band ever. And they make the most cleverest indie-pop – quite pop – songs, and after that tour their songs have just been stuck in my head every single day.
“It's kind of driving me crazy, but I'm obsessed with their music. We’ve somehow gotten the chance to bring them to Australia, so I'm extremely excited for that.
“And also in Brisbane we’re playing The Tivoli, that's been like a lifetime goal,” he enthuses. “That’s been a dream for 15 years, so to be able to play The Tivoli – and hopefully sell it out – it’s going to be a great honour.”
Last Dinosaurs’ Wellnxss is out now. Tickets to their upcoming Australia tour are on sale now.
Last Dinosaurs – 2026 Australian Tour
With elmjack^ and Bad Suns*
Friday, June 19th – Torquay Hotel, Torquay, VIC*
Saturday, June 20th – Northcote Theatre, Melbourne, VIC*
Thursday, June 25th – King Street Bandroom, Newcastle, NSW*
Friday, June 26th – Metro Theatre, Sydney, NSW*
Saturday, June 27th – The Tivoli, Brisbane, QLD*
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
