The Lazy Eyes may have formed as teenagers and self-produced their debut album – 2022’s roundly acclaimed SongBook – but that accumulated confidence and experience wasn’t enough to avoid prolonged difficulties while recording their follow-up.
“We thought we knew how to do it, but no,” confesses Harvey Geraghty, who shares the role of singer, songwriter, guitarist, and keyboardist in the Sydney psych pop quartet with Itay Shachar.
“To be transparent,” Shachar chimes in, “we found it really hard.”
Chatting over Zoom from separate spots in Sydney, the pair are now in their mid-20s. That means the four members – including bassist Leon Karagic and drummer Noah Martin – were only around age 21 when SongBook came out.
And the founding members (outside of Karagic, who joined a few years later) were just 15 when the group first came together via Sydney’s Newtown Performing Arts High School.
Despite that early start, The Lazy Eyes had already inked local and international management, distribution and booking agency deals by the time they released their debut single in 2020. After a pair of EPs, their debut LP and a wide swath of touring since then, it must have seemed like all the pieces would fall neatly into place when it came time to craft their sophomore album.
So what happened?
Learning Curve
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“It was just quite a big adjustment period for us,” Geraghty says. “We released the first album and were touring that. That was a first for us, and we didn’t know how to juggle everything. We had to tour and try to record in the gaps.”
That explains why it’s been four years between albums, and why the long-time-coming Cheesy Love Songs features songs that were primarily penned back in 2020 and 2021.
“The main challenge for us has been figuring how to produce the second album,” Shachar explains. “Just overcoming self-doubt. We realised that we had to do everything differently to how we made the first album. We had to learn lots of new things.”
After having relished ripe guitar effects, generous layers and trippy embellishment on SongBook, the band realised that they had to strip the newer batch of songs back to just being four people playing in a room together.
“Getting rid of anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary,” recounts Shachar. “And then it kept going down and down and down [in terms of layers], until it was just the band.”
Part of that ruthless paring-back process was inspired by the band’s Australian support run with The Strokes in mid-2022. “Watching them live influenced us a lot, just in terms of the stripped-back nature,” Geraghty notes. “The live band is the recording, which is pretty much the approach on our record.”
Early Bloomers
Having started jamming together at age 15, The Lazy Eyes have been precocious from the word go. Shachar started learning how to play music in Year 4, while Geraghty started at age 4. And even before that, Geraghty’s parents would play him a little album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the car. That wound up being formative in more ways than one.
“I kind of forget about it and found The Beatles on my own later, like when I was eight,” shares Geraghty. “I wanted to start from the start of their discography, so I bought Please Please Me. Then [I heard Sgt. Pepper’s again] and all these deep, young memories came back. Then I was a Beatles head since then.”
He even admits to praying to John Lennon and George Harrison as a kid. By contrast, Shachar immersed himself in 1960s psych more in early high school, through meeting Harvey and his future bandmates. But beyond ready comparisons to The Kinks, The Zombies, and The Beach Boys – especially given the band’s easy way around a vocal harmony – there’s something deeper that attracted them to that era’s touchstones.
“What really inspires us about that period of music is the songwriting, because it’s really melodic and free,” Shachar says. “We have a lot of modern influences too, but when we write a song, it always seems to get referenced back to ’60s [and] ’70s things.”
Some of those modern influences include indie mainstays like Grandaddy, Broadcast and Alex G, as well as classical music for Shachar and electronic fare for Geraghty. Plus there’s no missing the imposing spectre of Tame Impala across those early EPs.
And circling back to The Beatles, The Lazy Eyes recently posted a live-in-the-room cover of All You Need Is Love for Global Beatles Day, only for it to be shared on Instagram by none other than Sean Lennon.
From The Heart
Fans who’ve been following The Lazy Eyes from the start will remember that their very first single was called Cheesy Love Song. (The tune later resurfaced as the closing cut on SongBook.) That was just a placeholder title that stuck, and the same thing happened all over again with their second album.
Yet beyond the title’s self-deprecating implications, it neatly announces the sincerity that lies therein.
“When we both happened to write five or six love songs each,” says Shachar, “we thought of Cheesy Love Songs and just couldn’t really think of a different name. In a way, it lets us be super honest and ‘cheesy’.”
“It allows us to be serious, but under the shield of a joke,” Geraghty seconds.
“The album itself is pretty serious,” agrees Shachar, “so we wanted to make the title a bit lighter in some way, for it to feel balanced.”
Make no mistake: these are gorgeous, classic-sounding love songs that explore the deep range of emotions within that evergreen subject. Geraghty’s The One Who Got Away, Never Will She Know, and I Just Don’t Know You Yet artfully mingle melancholy with aching romance, while Shachar’s How Does It Feel To Be In Love? adopts Brian Wilson-inspired falsetto and his tune Every Day I Lay In Bed was designed as a soothing soundtrack to not wanting to leave your room (also a Wilson hallmark).
Most of the album’s songs were written on piano, and then often performed on vintage instruments found cheap online. That might be no huge surprise for a band who taught themselves how to record based on YouTube videos, but it means they now have a growing collection of quirky organs, electric pianos, and other keyboard instruments.
“With our guitar songs, we have so many pedals that can change the sound,” says Geraghty. “We were trying to explore the keyboard world and make sure every song had its own personality.”
Live Versus Studio
That motley assortment of instruments meant that The Lazy Eyes uploaded all of the individual keyboard sounds onto a N-Sonic sampler while recording the album – only to sample the N-Sonic selections onto a Nord for the live show.
Other fun touches on Cheesy Love Songs include a custom-made music box playing the melody on the opening instrumental Ballerina. While that same melody reappears at the end of Always In The Back of My Mind, Geraghty envisioned it as a standalone piece rather than the germ of a proper vocals-and-lyrics composition.
And the hooky Mr Histograph arose from the band listening to the last album’s Imaginary Girl backwards.
Despite such playful trickery, the quartet have already committed to recording the next record in the same way as this one: as stripped-back as possible. They also envision these first three albums as a trilogy – with the idea that the first LP branches off into two directions for the second and third, which are yin-and-yang inverses of each other.
“One side is more melodic and raw and honest and stripped-back,” reasons Shachar, “and the other side is energetic and dance-y and upbeat.” That means the next album should fall squarely into the latter category, but of course it’s still early days.
“It’s a tricky balancing act,” Geraghty admits, “to change and evolve but also keep some sort of consistency.”
After supporting Psychedelic Porn Crumpets in four cities earlier in the year, The Lazy Eyes have locked in a ten-day headline tour to launch Cheesy Love Songs. “We’ve played the new songs live for a while, and it’s been good,” says Shachar. “They command a different kind of energy in the room, for sure.”
And not to spoil anything, but fans can expect a certain special guest to come along for the ride. Laughing, Shachar confirms: “We’re bringing the little music box on tour as well.”
The Lazy Eyes' Cheesy Love Songs is out now. Tickets to their national tour are on sale now.
The Lazy Eyes – Cheesy Love Songs Tour
Friday, September 18th – Crowbar, Brisbane, QLD
Saturday, September 19th – Mo’s Desert Clubhouse, Gold Coast, QLD
Thursday, September 24th – The Night Cat, Melbourne, VIC
Friday, September 25th – The Sound Doctor, Anglesea, VIC
Friday, October 2nd – Jive, Adelaide, SA
Saturday, October 3rd – Mojo’s, Fremantle, WA
Friday, October 9th – Fun Time Pony, Canberra, ACT
Saturday, October 10th – La La La’s, Wollongong, NSW
Friday, October 16th – The Factory, Sydney, NSW
Saturday, October 17th – The Stag & Hunter, Newcastle, NSW
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
