Sacrificing Love For Music & Doing Away With Indie For Good

Slap on The Griswolds' second album High Times For Low Lives and brace yourself - this is not a follow up to Be Impressive. This is The Griswolds as you have never heard them before; riddled with hip hop and electro-R&B, Motown vibes and twinkles of pop, rumbling nods to classic Michael Jackson and Prince. Bye bye indie-rock. "What's saying that we can't do this right now?" Chris Whitehall mock protests. "I think that's something that too many artists get in their heads; that you have to sound a certain way or that you have to sound like your first album."

"We wanted to break free from sounding like another indie rock band, I think that sound has just been around for too long."

This is the era of cross-pollinating genres, and the Sydney four-piece have skirted around the curse of the second album by literally throwing their signature sound out the window. "Really it was just a frustration with how bands sound so similar. You know indie bands, it's all the same and we didn't want to sound like that. We wanted to break free from sounding like another indie rock band, I think that sound has just been around for too long," Whitehall explains. "We just wanted to be free to create music that we love... no rules, really knock the boundaries down."

More so than the stylistic constraints they've smashed, Whitehall has personally broken down the emotional distance between his inner-most self and the audience, offering up his own vulnerability, and in many ways his dignity, in the name of art. Thematically, High Times For Low Lives follows the band's debauched escapades following their debut success, with an ominous, raw focus on the intensely personal narrative of Whitehall's relationship break-down - something that came about almost as a direct result of the album's lyrical content. "I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was just really disrespecting the relationship I was in while I was on the road... I really fucked that up," he says simply. "When you're touring for six months straight... it's very easy to turn to booze, drugs are so available, girls are so available and it's not the kinda life we wanna live, it's just all so fucking available and that's why we came up with this title High Times For Low Lives because in this event we're the low lives."

Though the album begins with the break-up and spirals from that point on, the turning point in real-time was when Whitehall made the decision to show his girlfriend the lyrics he penned. "These songs are definitely painful for her to hear... In writing this album, that was one of the big reasons we broke up. When she actually heard some of these songs, it was like 'right, so this is how it is for you? This is what your life is? I'm learning things about you through the music you're writing' and I was like 'yeah, I'm really sorry'.

"I definitely knew this band and this album would be a sacrifice... We definitely were aware of the risks being that honest on this album, what people would hear. But again, we really didn't want to dumb it down, we didn't want to tame the potential of this honest album... I think, again, we wanted to say something. I don't think artists today, they're not saying enough, they're just singing about candy bullshit, songs that kinda mean nothing."