All The Threes

Young Melbourne quintet Loon Lake hit the ground running upon their inception a few years back, pricking ears left, right and centre with their vibrant and distinctive brand of indie-slash-garage rock. A lot of those ears were connected to the right heads too, and before they'd even released anything official they'd become triple j staples and won the BIGSOUND competition to come up to Brisbane and represent at the country's biggest music conference.

Last year they released the excellent debut EP Not Just Friends, whose cache of catchy tunes gained the band even more traction, and now they're following it up with the equally infectious Thirty Three EP. There's a definite musical evolution on show, plus a distinct change in lyrical tone (perhaps due to a breakup), but it's still the same band and still the same vivacious aesthetic.

“We're stoked, I'd say we're even more happy with this than the first one,” offers affable frontman Sam Nolan of the new release. “We just wanted to progress a bit and I think we've done that so we're really happy.”

Nolan and his brothers – Simon on guitar and Nick on drums – grew up in rural Victoria not far from Wangaratta, and there's a definite familial bent to much of their musicianship.

“We've all been playing since we were teenagers, but we certainly weren't in a band together until recently,” Sam continues. “I was in a couple of little things, but we weren't in anything of any substance until we all got together. Nick, the youngest one who's the drummer – he's probably a better guitarist than any of us – he did a lot of study, because we got him into it when he was really young. He went to uni for a couple of years and was studying jazz, but he didn't like that direction so he's doing another course now. Dan [Bull – guitar] was in a lot of cover bands in Melbourne when he was younger, and he was in an original band called Hot Rubber Glove when he spent a little bit of time in Brisbane and Cairns. But none of us have ever been into anything properly until Loon Lake; we were all mainly playing in the bedroom until three years ago.”

According to Nolan the band's distinctive sound is as much a happy accident as anything.

“Just having three guitars and just trying to find a space for everyone, that sort of helped develop it,” he offers. “Sime's got a Gibson 335, and I've got a Tele and Dan's got a Strat so there's three pretty different sounds there, so it just developed. And as we started to develop a distinctive sound we were really quite conscious of finding it and honing it.”

And with two separate Queensland jaunts scheduled for the next month or so the band couldn't be happier, quite content spending time in this neck of the woods.

“We came up there when we won the BIGSOUND comp for triple j a couple of years ago, that was right at the start and was a real buzz for us because we hadn't done anything like that,” Nolan enthuses. “And then we came to BIGSOUND again last year, and now we've got it again this year – we love it! We went up there and played with Kaiser Chiefs as well, we love playing in Brisbane – the crowds are great and the people are cool, plus I have some good mates up there from work, so it's always fun to hit Queensland. And it's great to get away from the fucking cold here too, I can tell you!”