Honesty, sincerity, integrity – these words are thrown around a lot in musical circles, but don’t really seem appropriate all that often. Smoke and mirrors abound in the music scene, shrouding even the most casual outfit with at least a thin veneer of deception or disingenuity. Not so Melbourne folk-punks The Smith Street Band. In a career which hasn’t even reached the five-year mark – but which has already spawned three albums and two EPs – they’ve become renowned for their no-bullshit approach to their craft, pumping out anthemic, life-affirming songs which are often sad in content but delivered with such joy and conviction that it’s almost impossible to not be swept away in the moment.

"We try to squeeze the maximum out of everything in case people realise that we’re a shit band soon, so we grab everything by the scruff of the neck as much as we can."

And it’s not just Australia but the world that’s starting to pay attention. They started out building a like-minded community in Melbourne, spread that gradually to the far reaches of our country and are now hooking up with empathetic bands from punk scenes all over the planet. And now – on excellent third long-player, Throw Me In The River – this penchant for globe-trotting is beginning to shine through in their music.

Written on tour in three different continents, the album includes titles such as Calgary Girls, Surrey Dive and East London Summer, and exotic imagery abounds throughout  the lyrics. If their 2012 sophomore album Sunshine & Technology was the sound of suburban Melbourne, and 2013 EP Don’t Fuck With Our Dreams found the band stretching their wings and exploring wider Australia, then Throw Me In The River is The Smith Street Band taking on the globe, their familiar worldview now being beamed to us from more exotic locales but with similarly intoxicating results.

“It wasn’t conscious at all,” explains affable frontman and songwriter Wil Wagner. “A few people have said, ‘Did you mean to stop writing about Melbourne because the album’s coming out everywhere?’ but it’s more that I just write about wherever I am at the time. It definitely wasn’t a conscious thing. I never thought that I’d be able to afford to go on a holiday to Europe in my entire life, so the fact that I’ve been able to go three times now already with my friends is a real dream come true and something that we never expected would be able to happen. It’s so inspiring and you do really try because when [you go to Europe] it’s like, ‘In six months everybody’s going to stop caring about us, so let’s make this the best tour we ever do because it could be the last one!’ We try to squeeze the maximum out of everything in case people realise that we’re a shit band soon, so we grab everything by the scruff of the neck as much as we can.

“I get so inspired by this global sense of community that we’ve come across – coming from Melbourne there’s a tight little community of bands, with Poison City Records and all of the bands that we’ve been friends with for years like The Bennies. We might not sound the same, and on paper it’s a bad pairing because we have very different takes on being a band, but I’ll play shows with them forever because they’re people that I love and they have morals that I share and that kind of thing. Now we’re amazing friends with bands like The Menzingers and Restorations – we have great friends in the UK and America, we even have great Austrian friends in a band called Astpie. You just meet people and you’re like, ‘You have the same influences as I do, and you’re bummed about the same type of things that I was, and you started a band for the same reason that I did, but you speak German and I speak English.’ It’s so inspiring to realise that there is this massive but almost unknown and unspoken about global connection between people, just sad people that want to write songs. It’s really beautiful and super-inspiring.”

Apart from the geographical tropes, Wagner is unsure whether there’s a lyrical thread tying the songs together throughout Throw Me In The River, although it might just be too early in the picture for him to reach full understanding.

“I guess there is a bit – there’s probably more on this than the other records because they were all written on the road,” he ponders. “But I try not to think about stuff when I’m writing as much as I can, so any themes that come through I’ll work out later – I’ll listen to the album in six months and go, ‘Oh that’s what this is about, I didn’t know that at the time!’ Half the time I write it’s to actually try to understand what I’m feeling a bit better – I use it in a very therapeutic way. I’ll write three songs and two will be catchy, and the third will be a seven-and-a-half minute song with two chords about how sad I am today, and I’ll be, like, ‘Ah, that one probably doesn’t have to come out, that one can be for me.’”

"I have no expectations. I played it to my mum and she liked it, and I’m proud of it, so anything from here on in is a bonus as far as I’m concerned."

For Throw Me In The River the four bandmates refused to rush, decamping to the rural Victorian enclave of Forrest (having tracked the drums already in Melbourne’s Sing Sing studios) and allocating more time to get things exactly as they pictured them in their heads. The result is more nuanced and refined than earlier material, but still plenty gritty and never too slick or shiny. Did the process feel different given their recent ascension in profile, knowing that more people would be listening?

“It’s sort of not that different,” Wagner tells. “I’ve said this before, the biggest jump almost was from the first EP [2011’s South East Facing Wall] to [2012 debut album] No One Gets Lost Anymore, the first record – that was going from no people to like 200 people, which was fucking terrifying! Since then it seems pretty gradual and kinda nice. I said the same thing talking to Luke [Boerdam] from Violent Soho; ‘This must be fucking terrifying the prospect of writing the next album because everyone’s going to be listening?’, and he just shrugged and said, ‘Ah well, everyone’s going to listen but I just write what I’m going to write,’ which is a really nice way to think about it.

“But somehow I didn’t really feel that – or maybe I did and I just didn’t know about it – but I tend when I’m writing to not think about it too much, just say it and get it all out and then worry if Mum’s going to hear it kinda thing. It’s still definitely nerve-wracking though – going through the lyrics for the last time there’s always a few lines where you think, ‘Ok, that’s gonna be fucking awkward when so-and-so hears that,’ or if you’re not painting your ex in the most positive light you think, ‘Oh well, that’ll get a phone call,’ but that’s ok. I think the lines that make me feel the most uncomfortable are the most honest lines, and they’re the ones that people respond to – I just try to be as honest as I can. That’s what people seem to connect with us, the immediacy and honesty of everything, so if I was trying to replicate that or write so I would sound like I was being spontaneous it just wouldn’t work. I just have to not stress and just let it out.”

Now that Throw Me In The River is public property, does Wagner have any expectations about how it may be received?

“I’d be pretty disappointed if it didn’t go double platinum,” he laughs. “I have no expectations. I played it to my mum and she liked it, and I’m proud of it, so anything from here on in is a bonus as far as I’m concerned. Which sounds like bullshit, but it’s totally true. I have no idea how many copies of any of our albums we’ve sold or anything like that – I’m stoked when I see our stuff on Pirate Bay, like ‘Great, there’s another few people who are listening to it!’ I just want people to hear the music – I just hope people do hear this record, and I hope they like it. I’m sure a bunch of people will say that we’re sell-outs for whatever reason, all of the same shit that happens whenever anybody does anything – some people will like it and some people will say it’s shit – but I feel like this is as good a representation of how the band sounds, at least in my head if not in everyone’s head, as we’ve done so far. I hope people get into it.”