Live Shows Should Be A Sensory Experience

"The band wasn't around before the album," explains Kid Radio's Marcus Ross. "The band came about as a result of putting all these ideas out on this album. Prior to that, Dylan (Smith) and I were in another band and then we kinda ended that. Then we had all these ideas which weren't going to fit our previous projects. So we got into the studio and started recording, with no limitations."

The Melbourne four-piece, which also features Chad Blaster and Thomas Butt, joined forces with one of Australian hip hop's premier producers Countbounce (TZU), the chemistry seeming a perfect match for the electronica of their debut LP.

"I've always been a big TZU fan," says Ross. "I went to see Countbounce speak at an APRA event for songwriters and he kinda just reeled off a bunch of other artists he's worked with outside of hip hop. It dawned on me then that he is a really diverse producer, so I thought it was worth getting together with him. We started off working on just one track with him and we really gelled well so from there, yeah, we decided he was the man for the job to put out a full album."

Tracks Super Villain, Far East and Young Heart preceded the album. So, on the eve of its release, when asked if he felt like an expectant father, Ross replied, "Releasing stuff in this day and age is such a different vibe than it was five years ago where basically you're going to be tracking your sales from day one. Half of our album is already out online. It's still an exciting thing to get a full album out there, especially being that the debut album has been two years since we laid out the original idea for this. It's been a 24-month pregnancy."

In a band with only eight hands, recreating 70-plus beats to a song involves quite the restructuring process. "It's a song before it becomes an electronic song. Once we go and translate that in the studio, it becomes a very different thing to how it was originally and the same goes for when transferring that live. So, while there is a beat going on as a backing track, we try to put as much as we can live so we're juggling quite a few roles. Each of us are kinda wearing many hats to play it live."

Kid Radio are also looking to make it a spectacle. "It's very important in this day and age, especially in the live arena. I think it's half-arsed if you're going to go out and tour and just be four people up on stage playing instruments. I think it's really important to have some visuals and use the technology that we have at our fingertips nowadays to do as much as we can to create a real sensory experience for the fans."