Why There's Always A Silver Lining In Luca Brasi's Songs

If This Is All We're Going To Be — the third album by hard working Tasmanian punk quartet Luca Brasi — is like a distillation of the sound they've been working towards for years: angsty yet melodic rock'n'roll with driving guitar lines, pounding drums and anthemic choruses, tied together by an innate camaraderie that can only come from years of shared toil and experience.

"We've been fucking around with this thing for six years trying to get the formula right and it kinda felt like it clicked with this record," smiles vocalist/bassist Tyler Richardson. "That's the go with the title and everything, it was like, 'This is our time to make it or break it, if no one likes this record then fuck it, we can't do any better than that.' But it hasn't come to that, so we're pretty stoked.

"There's a lot of themes of distance and not knowing exactly what I'm meant to be doing as opposed to what I am doing or want to do."

"We just wanted more melody and to focus on the songwriting a lot more, and we took every single song apart a whole bunch of times and put them back together again. [Lead single] Aeroplane was like our yardstick, like, 'Let's get a cohesive record that has all of the elements of the last two albums but focus on the melody and make big songs that have big hooks.' That was our goal, that was what we were hoping for."

The huge singalong nature of these new songs is undeniable — evidenced on their recent run supporting good mates The Smith Street Band — but there's also a definite depth to the lyrics being belting back at them in the live sphere.

"Listening back it does seem that in the majority of my lyrics, without really meaning to, there's a really personal feel — I don't know how to write anything else except out of my experience," Richardson ponders. "I guess I'm a pretty anxious sort of person and I overanalyse every single thing that happens, and this is a good way for me to get that stuff out. There's a lot of themes of distance and not knowing exactly what I'm meant to be doing as opposed to what I am doing or want to do.

"You expect yourself to be something and somebody else expects you to be something, and that whole weight of expectation — even though it may not even be real — often seems to be looming over you to conform to what you're meant to be doing, and I don't even know what that is."

But while Luca Brasi songs pose plenty of life questions, they're unfailingly uplifting in the end.

"I don't think I've ever finished a song which didn't resolve or didn't somehow come the other way around — I can't write a song that doesn't end up vaguely upbeat," Richardson laughs. "There's always some vague glimmer of hope shining through and I think that's maybe a metaphor for how I think, how life is. If you don't have that borderline bit of sunshine coming through then it's going to be hard to get out of bed each morning."