Fit To Burst

It's been ten years since brothers Nick and Jonathan Diener formed pop-punk outfit The Swellers. Fleshed out by Ryan Collins and Anto Boros, the quartet have quietly yet relentlessly plied their trade, touring persistently both Stateside and abroad since 2006. After the release of 2011's Good For Me, they parted ways with longtime label Fuelled By Ramen (Panic! At The Disco, Paramore, Fun.) and forged out on their own. On the cusp of their second visit to Australia in a year, it's clear that the leap into the unknown was a long time coming.

“Fuelled By Ramen was really good to us, but we came to realise that there wasn't much freedom there for us,” Nick Diener states. “We're a punk rock band that's been doing the same thing for ten years now, whether it's been popular or completely underground. We just had to decide whether we kept putting out records on this label, sign to another label, or do exactly what we wanted to do. We put up the money ourselves – we recorded most of the EP in my home studio – and it felt like a return to our roots. I wrote these five songs and I didn't second guess them at all. We saw it as a celebration of the last ten years, and here's to the next ten, see what we can get done on our own.”

Diener is quick to explain that they had outgrown the label to an extent.

“They were in control of our merchandise, our international distribution, they'd press us on what songs should go on the album, so they didn't control us as a band, but we felt limited in what we could do,” he admits. “We would offer ideas that were met positively, but these things more often than not turned into, 'We can't do that, period', and that's when we realised that the format of the label had changed slightly. It's much more of a Top 40 radio hit machine now. For a while we saw that as an advantage in that our record had some shredders that could become singles, but they wouldn't really say yes or no. We were in the friend zone so to speak, like you wanted to get with the girl but she would say, 'But it will ruin such a great thing'. I thought being the oddball out on the label would help us, and it did to a degree, but the best press we ever got was when we left. “

The new EP Running Out Of Places To Go follows on quickly after their Vehicle City Blues 7”, and it's the first true indication of the “new” Swellers sound.

“Vehicle City Blues was two songs that didn't make Good For Me that we thought should have and we used them as a statement of intent to let everyone know we weren't dying or fizzling away,” Diener stresses. “[The EP] mirrors the way we've felt over the past couple of years, and it's pretty angsty. We're still a very small band, yet that DIY approach to making your own records really feels liberating, like it's the way forward for us. This EP could be the last thing that we as The Swellers ever make, or it could be the gateway to five more full-lengths. We're at a spot now where anything goes. All I know is that after this tour we'll have a lot of time off, writing and recording, and if it works out and we have a whole bunch of songs, it's a waste not to go play them. It's what we do.”