Selve Announces First Album Recorded At Abbey Road Studios By Aboriginal Artist

Award-winning Yugambeh/Koombumberri/Gold Coast six-piece Selve - led by Jabirr Jabirr man Loki Liddle - has made history, announcing the first ever full-length album recorded by an Aboriginal artist at the iconic Abbey Road Studios.

Breaking Into Heaven, slated for release on September 12, is a high-theatre showcase of raucous post-punk, subversive psych-rock, tender indie-pop, and winking new-wave, tied together with rebellion and compassion - a powerful testament of First Nations stories, music and culture.

Penned over the course of a 3-stage residency between Broome, France and London, culminating in recording at Abbey Road's Studio 3 (known for being the studio that birthed Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon), Liddle says the long journey that Breaking Into Heaven went on is what “gave the record its soul.”

“Taking the embers of songs sparked on my Jabirr Jabirr Country and recording that at Abbey Road - this amazing ideal and root of Rock N Roll mythology - a reclamation, reimagining and subversion of that ideal through an inspired First Nations lens has taken place.

“The time we spent in Studio 3 was an unbelievable dream,” Liddle continues. “Everyone was nerding out and having a field day: sending things up to the plate reverb in the roof, running signals through ancient pre-amps and singing into microphones worth more than everyone’s HECS debts.

“Every member of the band was in peak form, everything you might imagine recording at Abbey Road to be like - it was like that. For Scott French (bassist and producer), it was like watching someone go from fighter pilot to the driver of an interstellar mothership. With the help of Thomas Briggs and Simon Benesch, he somehow made operating the most infamous studio in the world look easy, and was totally in his element."

The history-making element of the album’s recording was not lost on Liddle, who says, “Despite the awe of it all, I was gripped every day with the knowledge that I was only there because of those who have come before me, that I was sent there by my ancestors and my community because something bigger than myself was happening, and that my job was to devote myself to the music & story - and not get in its way so that it could communicate itself.

“Breaking Into Heaven is a glass brick shimmering with the light of the sun. A brick that has landed in your living room - as a gift, not as a threat. The embers of a project sparked on Jabirr Jabirr Country was carried across seas and lands and recorded in Abbey Road, breaking down doors to tell a First Nations story through the platform of the most notorious music studio on the planet.”

Alongside the announcement of this historic album, Selve has released the title track today - Breaking Into Heaven, a song “about breaking in and subverting the centres of power that have been used to author our fates en masse, stealing the pen back from the stealer and sprawling a First Nations story and future across the heavens above.”

Find the track’s music video, inspired by films like Asteroid City and 2001: A Space Odyssey, below.

Selve’s history-making album, ‘Breaking Into Heaven’, drops on September 12.