'We've Hit Our Sound'

There’s the Great Escape in Brighton and Liverpool’s Soundcity Festival. Guitarist Dean McGrath is in the middle of furiously writing a grant application to help fund the venture while Rolls Bayce are totally stoked about the crazy line-up. When asked for a rundown on the band’s conception McGrath likely shrugged as he casually says, “I don’t know, man!” He goes on to explain that he’d been friends with drummer James Wright for years. “I guess it’s the kind of stuff we’ve kind of never had the chance to explore in the bands that we’d been playing in. We went into it wanting to do something different.”

The EP is lo-fi and driven by the bass guitar. It features ample melody and crooning vocals. There’s also a prevailing slacker vibe that sounds akin to early Tame Impala. McGrath does note amiably that this is a comparison they cop from a lot of people. He explains that the sound “sort of came from a few different places. The stuff that we really listened to a lot of is ‘60s soul and weird old psych records that we’ve been accumulating over the years”. He adds, “The EP was a fairly condensed idea of what we do… We’re working on album tracks now and it’s starting to really spread out. The record’s going to be a bit broader.”

Rolls Bayce are not strictly a rock band, and they enjoy some of the limitations of being a three-piece as the smaller arsenal of musicians forces you to stay interesting creatively. “In this band it’s all about jamming out ideas and finding the strengths of the arrangement within the song and trying to get it interesting texturally. We’re doing things kind of backwards!” Full of confidence, and not to rest on any kind of laurels when talking about finding that ideal sound, McGrath says, “I think we’ve hit it. It doesn’t really boil down to one particular sound that we’re chasing but I think we’ve hit it.”

Having all been in various projects in the past the members of Rolls Bayce enjoy having the band as their sole focus. “Our rehearsal schedule is really lax, and we definitely don’t have to spread all our butter over a bunch of different things so we’re still kind of lazy.” This laziness doesn’t seem to impede the band from achieving results though, and the band, who recently played at the Secret Garden festival in Sydney, have a single launch tour fast approaching.

So what’s in store for Rolls Bayce? Would they ever experiment with different genres? McGrath muses, “It’s all wrapped up in the broader ideas we have for the band. It’s less about taking a massive left turn and changing up genres and more about bringing out every facet of what we’re into. We did a mixtape before this tour and it’s interesting because it runs the full gamut of what we’re into: world, soul and R&B stuff… the rockier stuff as well. It’s all in there!”