Last year,” begins an obviously still disbelieving Pat Pierce, one of the twins at the core of Melbourne’s Pierce Brothers, Jack the other twin, “I was talking to a mate and I said, ‘I reckon next year we’re gonna play at (Melbourne’s) The Corner. We’ve got to get to that level. It’s gonna be amazing.’ We were just fantasising about the year we could have. We had no idea that it could actually get this big.” 

Big is a bit of an understatement. So far this year, the twins who once busked in the Bourke Street Mall have played to more than 10,000 people at the Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands, becoming the second highest-selling act in terms of merchandise in the festival’s history; and blitzed London, where they sold the 11,000th copy of their Blind Boys Run EP; while their latest EP, The Night Tree, debuted at #1 in the AIR Album Chart, and a more modest #21 in the ARIA chart.

“Once we had a good copy of (latest single) It’s My Fault,” Pierce explains how it came about, “we sent that through to someone our manager works with over in Europe. He’s a radio plugger over there and he just ran with it and showed it to people, and everyone he showed it to said, ‘Perfect. Great. Love it. Love the story,’ and ran with it. The momentum just built up and we ended up getting Lowlands. It was just one thing after the other.

“We got there and we were getting stopped in Amsterdam and me and Jack are just looking at each other and going, ‘This is ridiculous!’ It wasn’t so much radio in Australia – at every show we’d do, they’d always just rally – and the last 13 shows or something just sold out. As soon as we said, ‘Let’s have another one’ the crowd just pushed even more. The support has been unbelievable.”

Yet, while Pierce Brothers might be said to be riding on the crest of a folk-rock revival that began with bands like Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire, the twins are actually drawing on a much older folk tradition – Australia’s bush ballads.

“We’re the first to say that we’re heavily influenced by bands like Fleet Foxes as well, but having the didgeridoo in there and being all really, really high energy, I guess what we were looking at is the shortfalls or the pitfalls that you can get in folk. We don’t want to fall into those routines – how can we change this up? How can we musically or artistically put a bit of an edge on this? Especially for the next album, we don’t want to play it so safe – we want to make a bit of a statement, get our own sorta sound, put our own twist on it.

“Our grandfather was a massive fan of Banjo Paterson and used to write poetry in that same vein, so I guess there was a big influence in that early on for sure.”