Dear Seattle Try Their Luck At Love On Their Third Studio Album 'TOY'

Sydney alt-rockers Dear Seattle are a household name for anyone in favour of nostalgic indie/alt rock circa late 90s/early 00s, but with an Aussie twang. 

Since 2013, the Northern Beaches-hailing band have garnered a cult following of loyal fans, boosting the band to an ultimate #10 spot in the ARIA Australian Album Charts for their debut 2019 LP Don’t Let Go. With their follow up album Someday debuting at #4 in 2022, there’s no doubt that the band’s next project would be a considerate elevation of their authentic take on old school pop punk and alternative rock.

Dear Seattle’s third album offering TOY comes out today with clenched fists, ready to rumble. Walking a delicate passage of love, loss, addiction and nostalgia, the album serves as a means of reflection and introspection, the four-piece creating a collection of “relatable anthems” that’ll have you screaming at the top of your lungs at one end, and huddled into a fetal position in the corner of the room at the other. Nonetheless, the essence of TOY is heard loud and clear through its sharp lyricism and even sharper vocal delivery and instrumentation, pushing the band further and further into rock icon territory.

For The Music, Dear Seattle takes us through the online criticisms, relationships and insecurities that influenced their third studio album TOY.

1. Nothing’s Stopping Me Now

Nothing’s Stopping Me Now was initially inspired by my reaction to a bad YouTube comment. It was my first instance of dealing with negative comments about something we had put out and it sent me down a rabbit hole of self criticism. It was a tough lesson but I came to realise I shouldn’t burn my energy paying attention to things like that. Every artist will know that feeling though, you often skip over all of the good comments and you focus intently on the negative ones. But I think for me, it was a broader realisation that I had consistently put barricades up in front of myself, and was stepping on my own toes in a lot of ways, either by dealing with perfectionist tendencies or even just being my own worst critic. I would often find it hard to progress with things because I would constantly be questioning whether I was good enough, and having this feeling of inadequacy. Why am I doing this? Who am I to put songs out? Who cares? When I read that comment, that’s when it really hit me, it felt like: this is the first time that someone else is seeing the thing that I see in myself. And it sucked. It kind of threw me for a loop, and I was ruminating on it for hours after I read it. But then I just had to snap myself out of it. I was like: what the fuck are you doing? Why are you giving so much attention to this random comment on YouTube in a sea of amazing ones? It was so ridiculous, and I really thought on that for the next few months and ultimately came to the conclusion I wasn’t going to let any of that shit stop me doing the thing that I love, and that is making music.

2. Promise

A lot of the album was written about navigating relationships, your place in the world with friends, past and present, with a partner, or with family. It’s a consistent theme across TOY. This track in particular, Promise, was written about that feeling you get when you go through absolute hell with someone, and you kind of both hit your rock bottom at the same time, but you still somehow manage to show up for each other. That is, to me, a whole other level of connection with someone. Sometimes everything needs to fall apart so you can put it back together in a better way.

I've always loved songs that are bittersweet in their emotion. I like writing that way because I’m generally an optimistic person, but I don't like when things don’t feel real. I always want it to feel like I'm writing about real life, and everyone knows that real life is fucking hard sometimes. It stems from when I was young and my dad passed away, and how I feel about it now. I always say that it’s the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me, because obviously, I would give anything to have him back, but to have experienced that at a young age, I also learnt so much from it and that process, and it fully shaped who I am today. So I think there's always something in the worst situations to be taken away, that can end up being something you reflect positively on in some way later in life.

3. Courtney Love

The reason Courtney Love follows on from Promise is because it’s about that next phase in life where you have all the pieces on the floor, a big pivotal moment has just blown up your world, and you're sitting there trying to put it all back together. A lot of this song is about finding out who you are again, almost resetting and being like: okay, I've just gone through a lot of different things and I've pulled myself apart in so many different ways, and now I'm just trying to work out how I want to be going forward, and the lessons that I want to take out of it all. And again, it's got that positive spin on it, it’s a weirdly cathartic feeling to go through that.

A lot of the time you don't want to move on from that past version of your life, which is another very big theme on the record, but at the same time, it's so exciting to look into the future and be like: holy hell, I'm moving on from being an adolescent, and becoming an actual adult. And while that's scary, it's also such an incredible part of life and I can't wait to see where I end up. It's that turning point in your life and the excitement and trepidation that goes hand in hand with it.

4. Evergreen

Evergreen is an interesting song because it came about so quickly when we were in the studio. I think we wrote the whole thing in a day and instantly we were like: there is something special in this song that we love, and we really need to be careful that we don't fuck with it too much. We were like: okay, don't touch it until the very end of the process, if it needs it. I think a big part of that is because a lot of the song is really about me dealing with emotional honesty.

I've always been pretty good at talking with my friends and family about their issues and emotional struggles, mental health and things like that. But I often struggle with expressing it myself, and just letting myself feel the things that I need to feel at certain times. I've always positioned myself as a helper in my friend groups. I think because I dealt with the passing of my dad early on in life, I felt equipped to be able to help friends go through what they were going through. And I got very comfortable being the helper, but never very comfortable being helped, or helping myself. A lot of Evergreen focuses on that

— learning to be honest with yourself, and that you’re allowed to feel what you feel. Whether it's grief or love or loss or lust; whatever it is, allowing yourself to be comfortable with the fact that you’re a human and this is the whole spectrum of emotions is important.

Also more specifically to the song, I would always find myself thinking that the grass is greener on the other side, and constantly wishing I was where I wasn't. If I'm on tour I’d be wishing I was at home and with my partner, or my friends and family, or if I'm at home I’d be wishing I was doing more and out on the road again. There’s been so many moments when I would beat myself up for not doing the things that I thought I should be doing, when in reality I was doing everything that I needed to. There's actually a line from a song Home Away From Here by a band called Touchè Amorè: “It’s just I have this problem / Where I want to be everywhere I’m not”. That line has always stuck with me so prevalently. And I felt like I needed to write a song about that feeling too, because I resonate with it so strongly. It all just came out organically with Evergreen, and I realised I must've been needing to say this for a long time.

5. Say What You Want

Say What You Want is a love song in so many ways. It's about a period of time with my partner, now fiancé, when we first started dating.. actually, before we started dating! We were really good friends, and I was so terrified to tell her how I felt, because I didn't want to ruin the friendship. So, a lot of Say What You Want is about that timeframe where I was just constantly tossing up: how do I do this? what should I do? how do I navigate this situation? And then realising: you’ve just got to say it. You’ve just got to put your heart on the line and take the risk if it's something that you want. So the song is about that, the mental gymnastics I was doing at the time, and the battle internally of just: do I? don't I? do I, don't I?! In the long run now, however many years later, I can look back and say: it was absolutely the right choice.

6. Counting Hours

Counting Hours is kind of in a similar vein to Say What You Want, in that it’s a bit of a love song. But it's more about the harsh truths of love. The chorus is: love's so sweet and I'm so sour. It's about when love fucks you up a little bit and all of the feelings that arise in those moments. It’s having the realisation that you're willing to do the hard yards and you're willing to go through the things that are difficult, which makes it all the more special.

It's funny because thinking about it now, I don't know if we've ever really written love songs before, or touched much on the concept of love. I think maybe I didn't really feel like I knew much about it. I was a bit more comfortable writing about heartbreak than love in earlier Dear Seattle songs. But in this recent period of my life, I've been going through a journey of learning what love really is and what it really means in comparison to what you get told it is, or what you see in movies and all that kind of stuff. And it's so special. It's so incredible to spend time with someone who is on a journey of life similar to you, and you're trying to make it work between you. And all of these things are happening externally in your lives that can impact you both in a relationship, but if you're always coming back to this feeling of commitment to each other and the process, it reaches a whole new level.

7. We Were So Close

We Were So Close is about grieving the loss of a friendship that never really had an end date. You didn't have an argument, you didn't have a fight or anything that ended the relationship. It's almost completely open-ended, and simply a victim of time. People's lives grow and change, priorities shift, the other person might move to a different city, or you just end up gradually growing apart. And as a child or a teenager, you sometimes hear your parents talk about how things change over time. They're like: oh, your high school friends are your high school friends, and you’re not always with them forever, all that kind of stuff. Over time, you'll make new friends from work or other places in life, but when you’re younger you always kind of think: that'll never happen to me. You think: I'm so close with my best friends and will be forever.

It’s all-encompassing when you're in high school. At that age, friendship is the compass of your whole life, it is the be all and end all. And as you grow older and you start to lose those friendships, it actually really hurts your heart in the same way that genuine heartbreak does. But heartbreak has definitive moments, there's a breakup or a fight or something like that. It sucks and you have that time to get over it. But with a lot of friendships, it's not like that. It's kind of like a slow death. And for We Were So Close, I was reflecting on that a lot and how much I hate that it’s the case. I wanted the song to feel like a letter to a friend being like: hey, I still think about you a lot, and I know that things probably won't ever be the same, but I just want you to know, I really, really cherish those moments we had together. And it is something that will stay with me forever.

Also, as a band when we're trying to pick what songs go on a record, sometimes I stop and think: oh, maybe this thing that I'm writing about is a bit too unique to me. And maybe the other boys in the band will listen to it and be like: I don't really get it, I don't follow along, that kind of thing. But for this one, all of them had a strong resonance to the subject matter. And that really can be the difference for us as a band and what songs we want to be on a record: what songs we can resonate with as a whole.

8. Sungazer

Sungazer is in a similar wheelhouse to We Were So Close. It’s talking about friendships and past relationships that you've had with people, but it's almost the other side of the coin. When I was young, I don’t think I quite understood that everyone is on their own journey in life, and that everyone's just trying to be happy at the end of the day. They're just trying to find the thing that they love and the things that light them up daily.

Sungazer is specifically about a friendship that I had where I just fully didn't understand why they were making the decisions they were making, and I was judging them based on it. I almost feel like my judgment of it killed the friendship in a way because I simply didn't understand, I hadn't been opened up to the concept that everyone's just trying to do their best. You never know if a decision's right at the time, and who am I to tell someone else how they should be living their life? So, this song kind of reflects on now being older and seeing how wrong I was in having that perspective. And really, it’s just me trying to say almost apologetically: do your thing. Go live the life that you have to live and be the person you want to be. I'll be here when you come back. And while I may not agree with it, that’s on me. You don't agree with everyone on everything. So go be the person you need to be, and I hope that we end up coming back together one day.

9. Cut My Hair

Cut My Hair is about the battle between what is considered self-esteem and what is self-importance. Being a performer and being on stage, and even just being in a band, and having to deal with social media… it takes a level of confidence that I struggled with. I could never really see the lines between self- confidence and arrogance. Maybe it was because I was lacking confidence in myself in different ways, but it would make me uncomfortable when I would see someone who was overly confident and seemed like they were entirely content being who they were, and showing this boisterous side of themself. Over time working on that and really trying to dig into what that was and what that meant for me, I started to realise that what I was dealing with was a bit of an inadequacy complex. And it stemmed from never really patting myself on the back for my achievements out of fear of being seen as arrogant.

Funnily enough, I distinctly remember a year ago there was a memory that popped up for me: When I was much younger, before Dear Seattle, I wrote this song that never saw the light of day. It was just a thing that I wrote in my bedroom. And I remembered listening to it back then as a kid, sitting in my bedroom and just having this vision of playing music to thousands of people, and honestly being like: damn, imagine if I could do that! That is the dream. And somehow it ended up happening. The show that connected the memory for me was Beer Incider Festival in Brisbane. We were in this big metal tent kind of thing, I don’t even know how many people were there, there's a photo of it floating around, but I would say there was probably 8,000-10,000 people inside the venue. I didn't realise at the time, but I had done the thing I’d seen in that vision, and that I was there, I was living that experience I had dreamt of as a kid. It was only a year ago that I actually realised I had achieved that, and I couldn't believe I had never patted myself on the back for getting there. I had never given myself the credit for the work I had put in, and being able to live out that dream.

I think a lot of what Cut My Hair is about is coming to terms with realising that there's a difference between arrogance and self-love and being able to feel confident in being like: I set my mind to something and I achieved it, and I deserve, not praise from other people, but praise from myself. And that’s really where this song came from.

10. Elastic

Elastic is one of the earliest tracks we had for TOY, it came from the same period as Nothing’s Stopping Me Now, so it was written quite a while ago. It’s focused around my experience of the culture in music, and things like alcoholism, drug use and stuff like that in the scene, as well as the expectations that surround those things. While this song was written so long ago, I now listen back to it and I'm like: I've learned so much since then. And once again, it's talking about a thing that I wasn’t entirely aware of when I was writing it. I very recently spent a few months off drinking. I was just like: I really need to learn how to function as a musician without it. And this is not saying that I ever dealt with alcoholism as an addiction or anything like that, but there is an element of how ingrained it is in the culture that you almost don't even have the choice. I would get on stage and I wouldn't know how to talk between songs without it, or again, it surrounded the “larger than life” feeling of wanting to be a performer. I don't really consider myself a performer, so I would need to drink to try and feel like I could tap into that, and be a bit more of a larrikin or energetic or whatever it is on stage. Because of that, I found it to be a bit of a crutch. And in recent times I just decided that I really wanted to challenge myself to be able to do all of that without it, and get to a point where it's not something that I have to lean on, and it's my choice if I want to have it or not. There’s a big part of that reflected in Elastic.

11. idc

Having idc come after a song like Elastic is kind of funny, because this song is pretty reckless in its lyricism. But it rolls back to that period of reckless adolescence and, again, reflecting on life and that period of being a teenager, just being stupid, young and dumb. Looking back at it as an adult and just being like: that shit was wild. It was crazy and dumb but I think you've got to experience those things to get to that next stage of cognisance and to reach a better understanding of yourself.

I wanted this song to just be fun and dumb for the sake of it because, I don't know if you've noticed in the rest of this track by track, but I always really try to have messages, and some poignance to the songs that we put out. And I think that can sometimes deprive me of a side of myself that is actually a big part of life as well, just being able to relax and have fun and not have everything be this big meaningful spiel about life. idc is purely just for joy's sake, and it also kind of touches on similar things to Sungazer. It's tapping into that notion of: I don't care what you do, if you are happy - do it! I don't care how dumb it is. If it's making you happy and you're not affecting someone else negatively in the process, do it. Live that dumb life. If you want to, just go for it, fuck it!

12. Reckless Pessimistic

Reckless Pessimistic was written about a period in my life where I think I had grown accustomed to expecting the worst. Which I guess is where the track title comes from, because it isn't actually a lyric in the song. A lot of the time, the titles of our tracks come from specific lyrics in the song. But for this one, I felt like it summed everything up, because it's so reckless to let yourself be pessimistic all the time. It’s actually really dangerous to let yourself fall into that spiral of negative thinking, whether it's about yourself or about others. I found myself being confronted with something really pure and good in my life, and almost expecting, and waiting for it to fall apart. When you have that mentality it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where you are almost imbuing the fact that it is going to fall apart because you're not willing to let yourself be open to it, and be completely vulnerable.

With this song, I was talking about my relationship and just being like: I've now been presented with something that is so pure and so amazing, and I'm almost shooting myself in the foot by thinking that it's not going to be good or it's going to have this downfall at some point. I think a lot of that stems from, funnily enough, what the whole self-titled Dear Seattle EP was about. It was all about a heartbreak. I'd just gone through a breakup with my first love. I think Reckless Pessimistic touches a little bit on the relationship trauma that I have as a result of that first real heartbreak, of having my heart fully broken and being afraid to let that happen again.

I now genuinely believe that if you get your heart broken, you should look at it as a blessing in some ways, because it means that you were capable of loving something that much. And that if you want to get there, to that level of love, you kind of have to accept the fact that heartbreak is a very real possibility, and you've just got to get comfortable with it. You can’t let it be the reason why you don't open yourself up. That, to me, is the reckless pessimistic side. It's almost like you're literally signing up to a life of less fulfilment than what you could have. Instead I decided: I'm going to focus more on optimism and just let it run its course. Even looking back now, that early heartbreak led to me writing the self-titled EP, which led to my music career. Yes, maybe I had this heartbreak that at the time felt like I would never get past, but it then led to something that is now my career and my life. And I wouldn't change it for anything.

I felt like that was a nice way to end the record, with a message to be optimistic about life, and that pessimism doesn't get you that far. And I think it's really cathartic when you do get there and you can look back and just appreciate it for what it was, and appreciate life for all its ups and downs.

Dear Seattle’s TOY is out now via all streaming platforms.