Remember My Name

They call themselves Strangers, but if things keep up the way they have been, that name's not going to be accurate for all that long. Only late last year did the hard workin', hard partyin' five-piece release their debut full-length, Persona Non Grata. Then, boom, cross-country tour that included driving to WA and back, and then heading off way, way north to Canada and the United States for the needs-no-introduction music-industry showcase South By Southwest. Apparently not ones to rest on their laurels, they'll soon be upon us as part of El Grande, a music festival with tour stops in Brisbane and Bundaberg before culminating in Gladstone, and that's not all.

“Things are good; busy back to routine after being away and getting back into writing – we're writing the second record at the moment,” the band's vocalist, Benny Britton, says, as though writing an album when you're as busy as Strangers have been is the most casual thing on Earth. “I mean… It took a while to get back into the swing of things. I was pretty wrecked by the end of everything, just like, 'I need a break, just to go home and rest my organs.' All the boys excelled really well – we've got a couple of younger boys in the group, so they're still fighting pretty hard, but I'm on a detox at the moment. Well, it's an idea. That's how it starts... I'm down to drinking one or two days a week now, instead of… Seven.”

Failed health and wellbeing plans aside though, the band are steaming ahead with their work. “Man, everything's sounding great,” Britton enthuses. “The songs are coming together really well, and I think at the moment we're at that stage where we've got the colour of the record, the right feel. So all the songs are having the same sort of cohesion. We're excited to release some new music and show the world our next record.”

It's an admirable and pretty rare sort of turnaround time, but rather than being a conscious effort, it's merely a symptom of the band's matured bond, Britton says. “It kind of comes naturally to the band now,” he explains. “It didn't at the start, because we were new to the whole 'writing a record' thing. We'd never released one before. The first record, we started off with a lot of ideas and we went to the studio with just a lot of ideas, not really songs. They kind of grew in the studio. But this next one, everything just seems to be falling out. I'll be sitting around the house or our guitarist, Mark [Barnes], will be sitting around the house, and they kind of naturally fall from the heavens, I guess.”

The other key thing about the band's sophomore album is that it will be their first written as a four-piece – guitarist Ben Kinsela released a statement this past weekend signifying his (entirely amicable) departure from the band. This, of course, adds a certain specialness to their upcoming shows, as they will, in fact, be Kinsela's last – not that, as you've probably guessed, Strangers are going to let that stop them from here.

“We went over to the States, and our guitarist proposed to his girlfriend and pretty much just doesn't want to tour anymore, and that's understandable, you know?” Britton says. “But the rest of the boys want to be a six-record band, or seven records, or forever, until we die. We're all pretty focused on that and that's our lives, man, so onward and upward, definitely.”