Are 78 Saab Making A Comeback?

Is the beloved Australian indie-rock band 78 Saab staging a comeback? If their social media presence today is anything to go by, it sure looks like they’re preparing something special for their fans.

Taking to Instagram this morning, the band – comprising vocalist and guitarist Ben Nash, guitarist/keyboardist Jake Andrews, drummer Nicholai Danko and bassist Garth Tregillgas – shared a reel that fans have likely been waiting to see.

Featuring messages from devoted fans – “please come back we miss you”, “time for an anniversary tour?”, “come to Melbourne!”, “… any hopes of a gig soon?”, 78 Saab delivered the following response: “Announcement coming soon”.

The video was soundtracked by their 2004 track, No Illusions, from the album Crossed Lines… which turns 20 this October. The reel was captioned “LFG” (let’s fucking go).

Are 78 Saab about to announce a Crossed Lines 20th anniversary tour?

78 Saab played their farewell Sydney gig at the Annandale Hotel in December 2012. While that was meant to be their final show, the band resurfaced in March 2013 to play in their home city of Canberra for the city’s 100th-anniversary celebrations alongside The Church and Falling Joys.

On their disbandment, Nash told The Music in an interview, “I just felt it was time.

“We've got a really good body of work for us, and perhaps, you know, it was better for us to spend the time required to get to the level we were accustomed to. The short answer to that is, basically, if you want to make a great album, it's not going to happen overnight; you have to put in some serious time, and perhaps we weren't sort of like getting that amount of time together to do that and so we thought that, as a result, let's call it a day.”

Discussing the band’s independent career as members became fathers and had less time for the band, Nash continued, “I guess we could have kept 78 Saab going, playing every couple of months, playing the hits, but I think we saw ourselves always as a studio band first and foremost, even though we love playing live and making great albums and perhaps we thought the work required to get to the level we were going to be happy with wasn't going to appear, even though I'd love it to happen.”

In their 15 years as a band, 78 Saab put out four excellent albums: Picture A Hum, Can't Hear A Sound in 2000, Crossed Lines in 2004, The Bells Line in 2007, and their final album, Good Fortune, in 2010.

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