Features / Music

"There’s a polemical element in my lyrics, I know, but that’s just for me; I’m just trying to say something to myself. I’m not trying to say something about music; I’m not trying to say anything about music."

“Not being the most conventional band, it’s hard for us to get things like radio play and that sort of thing. You know, it’s hard for a band like us to really break into that BIGSOUND/QMusic crowd. We still try."

“I love the guitar, I love playing the guitar. I think the reason I like it so much is because I actually think it’s a very difficult instrument to play, I don’t think it’s a very easy thing to get hold of at all."

“It’s still early days but we have nine new songs for the new record. We hope to write about twenty and then pick the best ones to record. Lyrically we’re dedicating this album to animal rights – so that theme will run through the whole thing."

“But I’m a gearhead, and I’ve been slowly piecing together a set-up where I feel that, if I lose control of my set-up right now I’m a total fucking idiot."

“The purpose is not to make the voice more in tune,” Leaneagh reveals, “it sort of distorts it in a certain way that kind of smoothens it out into an instrument, more than just a vocal performance.”

“What I’m really looking forward to is getting that response from the people there as soon as it happens. When you play live-to-air you don’t know if anyone’s listening, and this is going to be quite different."

"The way you make a record is for everybody to have a say and Nick was hands-on for sure, but at the same time he recognised that this was our band and that we’ve all made a lot of records without him. It wasn’t difficult to manoeuvre that."

"It would have felt really dishonest to just try and recreate that album because we’ve grown so much as a band and, you know, we just wanted to push ourselves to do something new and interesting."

"I was very broken-hearted and frustrated and very, very depressed, but sometimes you’ve got to go through these things and you learn from it."

“We just started playing it and went, ‘Ooh, let’s play this tomorrow!’ – that’s how most of our songs are written."

Ahead of his peformances at Laneway, we get inside the head of Holy Other.