'It Really Hit Home How We Mean Something To These People'

Sydney-based experimental/progressive post-rock ensemble We Lost The Sea have just hit the decade point of their career, which is a remarkable achievement for a band such as theirs. Not that they were thinking of calling it a day, far from it in fact. Guitarist Matt Harvey tells us that a recent tour of Europe on the back of their iconic 2015 album Departure Songs was such a cathartic and important moment in the band's history that has truly invigorated them for the future; a future in a sometimes rather unforgiving industry.

"We were really inspired by that tour of Europe," he shares. "It kind of justified a lot for me personally, and for the other guys as well, why we do what we do. It's not like it was special, outside of us and our fans, there's a thousand bands that tour all the time, I'm not trying to say that what we did was unique or anything, but it was special to us. It was our first time overseas, and we got an incredible response from our audiences, who were crying and just loving it and being really emotionally invested in our music.

"People were telling stories about how we've helped them through life and saved their life, or got them over grief or tragedy. It was really intense and it really hit home how we mean something to these people."

The tour offered a moment of reflection for Harvey and his bandmates, that help the six-piece realise there's sometimes more to playing music than writing and recording songs and going out to gigs. "We now have a duty to do this. This is the reason we do this, not just that we're some dickheads from Campbelltown who play 20-minute songs. We came back with a new sense of purpose."

The next page of this reinvigorated new chapter for the band begins very shortly, as they head off on a run of the eastern seaboard and Adelaide in early December, in celebration of the fifth anniversary of their breakthrough second album The Quietest Place On Earth. The rather tragic history of the band around that time was a major factor in We Lost The Sea wanting to celebrate that particular milestone.

"We lost our singer Chris Torpy to suicide a few years ago," he recalls. "That was one of the main driving inspirations behind Departure Songs. The Quietest Place On Earth was the last album he recorded on. It was a big step for the band when it came out, and it put us on a very small map. We did a few shows and started to get a bit of momentum and then tragedy struck, and we stopped playing it and put it away. So we just thought that, now we should just celebrate that and do a tour around it."

The band are bringing in a special guest vocalist especially for the tour. "It's our friend Jarrod Krafczyk, who sang in The Amenta for a number of years, so that should make it even more special."

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