Moaning Lisa Unpack New Album 'Fainter', Track-By-Track

Three years on from the release of their debut album, Something Like This But Not This, Naarm/Melbourne-based rockers Moaning Lisa have returned with their second effort, the essential fainter.

A highly-anticipated release, it’s a record which captures that fuzzy, ‘90s alt rock influence that Moaning Lisa were raised on, blended with the clarity of contemporary pop. This time around, they’ve gone further into the world of sound, sharing digital manipulation and electronic influences while maintaining that trademark vibe fans have come to know and love.

With previous released steeped in angst and urgency, this time, fainter sees them grappling with themes of grief, complacency, disappointment, social anxiety, isolation, boredom, deterioration, and self-determination.

Together, Moaning Lisa – which comprises Charlie Versegi (singer/guitarist), Hayley Manwaring (singer/bassist) Ellen Chan (lead guitarist), and Hayden Fritzlaff (drummer) – have crafted an album that is equally daring and familiar, emotional yet comforting, and reflective though powerful.

To celebrate the release of the record today, Moaning Lisa have been kind enough to share with us an in-depth track-by-track breakdown of the album, looking at how it all came together over these past few years.

01. fainter

The title track of Moaning Lisa’s sophomore album comes in the form of a shimmering, anthemic indie-rock track, complemented by slide guitar breathing in and out, and drums that drive into its cinematic climactic ending.

“fainter is a song for anyone grieving,” Charlie says of the thematic inspiration and origin of the track. “Whether you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or a past self, the experience of grief is exhausting and relentless and we wanted to capture that. We wrote it right at the beginning of lockdowns in Melbourne. Within a week my life radically changed.

“Our recording session in Sydney was cut short due to border closures, a close family member of mine was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and my long term relationship ended suddenly. I went into a deep depression and found myself in this state of limbo, feeling like my life was slipping away from me. 

“The lyrics came almost immediately, like a flood gate opened and I realised the crux of my problem was how impatient I was being with myself. There’s that old saying of ‘life is short’ as an argument for living life to the fullest but I was faced with all this space and uncertainty in front of me that it just wasn’t ringing true. It wasn’t until I discovered the ancient stoicism stance on life, that life is long and so you should live it to the fullest because there’s so much of it and this really stuck with me.

“Stop rushing through the bad just to get to the good, take your time with important things and ensure you’re giving yourself the space to heal. My favourite lyric from ‘fainter’ that sums up this notion is ‘if there’s one thing I’ve learned from loss, you can make it worse watching the clock’.

“Hayden recorded the instrumental when he was inspired by Egoism’s What Are We Doing and he’d accidentally looped the guitar chords in the wrong spot, so it makes the verses seem almost disconcertingly long,” Charlie says of the other members’ contributions to the track. “Ellen plays those guitar slides with a drumstick, simply because she couldn’t find her metal slide when recording the demo, but it made those parts so iconic and unique because of its unconventional technique”.

Moaning Lisa’s year of heavy touring also led to them finding a title for fainter, inspired by a peculiar occurrence that began happening when they played the song live. “It remained untitled for ages, until we started playing it live while touring in 2022 and we asked the audience to suggest potential titles for it,” the band says. “One particular person suggested fainter to reference a bizarre phenomenon happening at these shows. On more than one occasion, after we played this song, someone in the audience would faint. 

“I love the double meaning of the word fainter because you can also read it as something fading away or deteriorating, which is how I’ve grown to think of the pain of loss over time – it’s still there, just fainter.”

02. wayside

Born from a writing session with producer and songwriter Alex Markwell (founding member of The Delta Riggs, and co-writer to Kita Alexander, Teen Jesus, and Stelli), conflicting schedules meant that only vocalist/guitarist/bassist Hayley Manwaring could attend the session. Written at the Aviary Recording Studio in bustling Abbotsford, it was a far cry away from the band’s Preston living room that doubles as their writing space.

Though an initially nerve-wracking experience for Hayley to be in a session without her other three band members, the results were magic, and illuminate Hayley’s powerful voice as a songwriter in her own right, something her bandmates strongly encourage. 

“The day I had my session with Alex my head was swimming with fatigue after a full day of work at the Maton Guitar factory,” Hayley says of her writing inspiration. “As a production worker there, a lot of my hours are spent just working away, completely lost in thought, surrounded by a cacophony of industrial noise. At this time I remember listening to a lot of heavy music - LOATHE, Deftones, Saosin – just to drown out the constant hum and clank of the factory floor, and I think this made its way into wayside.”

“Plain and simple, wayside is a big heavy emotional rock song you can feel with your whole chest,” says Charlie, who took a backseat on lead vocals for this track. “Likely to please concert goers with a chorus you can really scream your lungs out too. Wherever this song finds you, it will install a sense of ‘main-character energy’ into your day. The mood is very teenage; learning, un-learning and doing your own thing are at the core of this song.”

03. 4am (where have you been?)

4am (where have you been?) is a sardonic look at paranoia in relationships in the form of an upbeat indie rock song. Heavily inspired by pettiness, insecurity, and indie sleaze, the track’s snarky-toned vocal melody helps deliver the difficult topic with levity. 

“It’s an embarrassing thing to admit, let alone write a song about,” says Charlie. “No one wants to feel like their partner is lying to them or sneaking around, no one wants to be the clueless idiot waiting up at home. As a songwriter though, I’m a glutton for punishment and excavating my deepest, darkest feelings, but I wanted to have fun with it!”

The lyrics start by describing a night out and getting kicked out of a venue after an altercation with a security guard. “That did actually happen, I got into a fight with a security guard who was being transphobic to a friend of mine but I didn’t get kicked out,” says Charlie. “Probably because it was at a sold out Moaning Lisa show lol.”

04. agoraphobia

Arguably the most important song on the album, agoraphobia is Moaning Lisa’s anti-single. A five-minute-long singer-songwriter moment that evolves slowly into a sprawling wall of sound, it sees the band challenging every instinct they have to trim and tighten songs into more easily digestible forms. For fans of Phoebe Bridgers and being kind to oneself. 

05. getting over you is on my list of things to do (but not at the top)

getting over you… was born from Ellen Chan’s see-sawing, untamable guitar riff that bursts out of the speakers from the get-go. The song was birthed from Ellen’s incessant listening to DIIV’s Deceiver and Cherry Glazerr at the time and a penchant for dark-brooding guitars crossed with bursts of uplifting pop-rock relief. It finds the band pushing the limits of their taste; “How bratty can we make this guitar tone? How silly can we make the chant in the chorus? Is it legal to make the pre chorus so angelic after such a hectic verse?” 

It’s been pitched internally as the song that will either make you love or hate Moaning Lisa. Either way, the Fall Out Boy-length title speaks to exactly how seriously the band are taking themselves on this one.

06. flutey

flutey was never meant to see the light of day. The final song to be added to the album, it connects the dots between Moaning Lisa’s stadium rock ambitions and the bedroom pop of their day-to-day. flutey is built around a secretly-recorded flute performance captured by Hayley Manwaring and features sampled vocals from an unreleased song Leo Moon. It’s the band’s first (largely) instrumental track with Charlie’s refrain “to face all the things I’ve lost”, borrowed from the album’s title track, the only discernible lyric. It’s also the band’s first fully self-produced song. 

07. derail / 08. de facto

Preceded by an instrumental intro with derail, the instrumental for de facto is built around a pulsating guitar loop made with a Line 6 delay pedal. The incessant rhythm mirrors the ideas of dissatisfaction and the disquiet in the routine comfort of relationships that Charlie brings up in her lyrics. 

09. anything, anyone

Sometimes it’s important to know when to get out of your own way and let the song speak for itself. anything, anyone has an earnestness seldom found anywhere else in the ML catalogue and highlights the band’s affinity for Brit rock balladry popularised by acts like Oasis and Radiohead. Its somewhat spare arrangement does justice to the chorus lyric: “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone”. 

10. flower

flower has been Moaning Lisa’s emotional centerpiece for well over five years. Long considered an off-limits Charlie Versegi song, it threatened to appear on their debut album, Something Like This But Not This, and even earlier without ever feeling right. At the request of co-producer Ben Moore, the band played four guitars in unison to establish the song’s central, rolling rhythm over which Charlie recorded a small tower of vocal layers. The result is the most intimate moment of the band’s career thus far.

11. comfortable 2 (alone)

Regarded after the fact as a spiritual sequel to early Moaning Lisa song Comfortable, Hayley Manwaring spends comfortable 2 (alone) being content on her own: “Happy with this, alone”. Whether wanted or not, the spaces all around her are eventually filled in by the cacophonous, slow-burning guitar music of her bandmates. It feels like an appropriate album closer to a record that finds solace in taking things slow, seeking happiness within yourself and disappearing old wounds into the distance.

Moaning Lisa’s fainter is out now.