The Nation Blue: modern life.

The Nation Blue play the Hotel Great Northern, Byron Bay on Thursday, the Troccadero, Surfers Paradise on Friday and The Zoo on Saturday and Sunday.

Six months have passed since The Nation Blue’s last Brisvegan adventure. Now they’re heading back as the special guest of fellow Melbourne rock music champions Magic Dirt and international post hardcore warriors Girls Against Boys. A tasty line up if ever there was one.

“The other guys in the band grew up listening to GVSB, so it’s kind of like an Almost Famous rock and roll dream,” bassist Matt explains of the coming tour. “We get to go almost all around Australia with them. We can’t wait. We’ve done quite a bit of stuff with Magic Dirt before, and to some extent they’d become our friends anyway. We did a show with them in Albury, and they said, ‘we should do a tour’. We got a call about a month later.”

The band have been biding their time working on the successor to last years outstanding Blueprint For Modern Noise release.

“We’re still writing at the moment. We were planning on recoding, but because of the tour we’re going to wait until we’re back. I’m assuming we’re going to be doing an album just after we get back. We’ve gotten up to about five songs, with a few more that aren’t quite there yet.”

“The songs are more well written, I think,” he muses. “With Blueprint we were still finding out who we were as a band, especially with me as a new member. The lyrics we something we just kind of tacked on at the end, but now it’s much more a complete process. We’re not just writing songs in one night. Sometimes it can be quite frustrating, but the songs that are coming out are real crackers.”

Since the band relocated from Tasmania to Melbourne (at which point Matt entered the line up) the way the band operates as a unit has continued to change.

“I guess they had a bit of a Tassie vibe when they moved over. When they came over here they were one of the only bands really doing anything in Tassie, as most of the other bands had already moved to Melbourne. At that stage it was a bit of a shock to them rehearsing a couple of times a week, when prior to that they were doing one or two rehearsals a year… Professionalism isn’t really the word, but we’re getting a lot smarter about what we’re doing.”

If you’re smart, you’ll take notice when they hit a stage near you.