How A 'Refreshing Kick Up The Arse' Inspired Ocean Grove's Finest Work To Date

One of the most iconic symbols of the technological revolution, the flip phone also brings to mind some of the old-school charm of the colourful late-'90s, early-'00s era.

Speaking to us from Poland where Ocean Grove are touring ahead of the release of new LP Flip Phone Fantasy, bassist Twiggy Hunter reminisces, “It was like the realisation that we were in the centre of the technological revolution.

“It’s only now that it’s become this thing that almost anyone has and you have the world at your hands and in your pocket... If you’d have asked me back then if we had such easy access to anything that we wanted, I would think that you were pulling my leg!”

It’s this sense of sci-fi wonder from yesteryear that the band have channelled into Flip Phone Fantasy, something dubbed by the group as "retro-futurism" - and it’s just as deep as it sounds.

“Our past is always there to either complement the present or remind us of how bad things have gotten in other ways... In a way [the album] represents what the past perceived the future was going to be,” explains Hunter. “This record references a lot of different time stamps for us that were very shaping of our current selves. We kind of went back to those moments to choose sounds to play around with - there’s a lot of late-'90s and 2000s references here, be that in the undertones of the melodies or the full-body rock sound in some of the songs. It’s all a representation of what we feel shaped us, so we tried to embrace a lot of that.”

Of course, embracing shelved sounds isn’t anything new for the band. Their last record, 2017’s celebrated The Rhapsody Tapes, combined elements of nu-metal and skate-punk with metalcore and a smattering of hip hop, earmarking them as one of the more interesting bands to rise out of the surging Aussie metal realm.

However, after signing a worldwide deal with BMG, the band lost both their frontman Luke Holmes and founding guitarist Jimmy Hall. It was in this period of transition, with bassist Dale Tanner stepping up to frontman duties, that Hunter came in, and what follows is undeniably the band's finest artistic work to date.

“I was involved here and there creatively on Rhapsody Tapes... some of the outfits that Dale wore were my creations,” Hunter recalls on how he came to be involved with the group. “Nothing really changed from how it was - we’re all mates, and we’re still mates with our past members. I came in, added my own spice and gave them a refreshing kick up the arse and just went, ‘Let's write a fucking album.’ Dale and I were spending five days a week sometimes with Sam [Bassal, drummer and producer] in his studio, doing this while paying bills and rent, but we weren’t at home, so we were really giving it our all.”

It might have been a rollercoaster 18 months for the band, but they’ve come out of it with something incredible to show, and Hunter assures us that confidence is running high as they kick off a new decade.

“We all feel fucking great and more confident than ever,” he exclaims. “At the start of the process we all sat down and put our goals on the table and put all our feelings out there to discuss what we wanted to get out of the writing process. This is something that we’re all willing to give our absolute all; we’re confident that people will love the album, we’re confident it’s the first of its kind in this kind of mixtape form... We think it’ll translate well to people.”

Only time will tell how it’s received - but with the recent resurgence in popularity for the '90s nu-metal sound and aesthetic, things could be peaking at just the right time for Ocean Grove.