This One Time, On Bandcamp: Brief Habits

OK, so, yes, we've featured a few stellar Queensland bands in this column of late. But, hey, it's a big state.

Besides, with the Qld Music Awards being held in Brisbane tomorrow night, it's the perfect window to be showcasing the Sunshine State, however inadvertent that synchronicity actually was. (Or maybe it was entirely purposeful. You don't know.)

Having shot down the north-east coast from Cairns to Mackay, we'll move onto another state from next week, but before we do, we have to tip our hat to this excellent emergent band bursting out of the north side of Brisbane.

Brief Habits — Brisbane, Queensland

In case you haven't noticed, Adelaide label Hobbledehoy Records has pretty quickly asserted itself as a curator of some of the finest local and international indie-punk/rock and emo releases, including previous This One Time... feature artists Crusch, and the inclusion of Brief Habits among their ranks is a logical, absolutely perfect fit.

The band is made up of brothers Dan and Steve Rogan, who have been fixtures of the Brisbane indie-rock and punk scenes over the past 10 years, along with drummer Elliott Fuller and bassist Luke Martin.

The group describe themselves as an "umbrella for a sound that marries all the complexities of the alternative music they love and enjoy with insightful, often brave, lyrical content", and with their self-titled debut full-length, released earlier this month, it's safe to say they've unarguably realised that vision ably on record.

It's an especially remarkable piece of work given how short a time Brief Habits have been together and the fact they've only just started performing live as a unit. The band's members are all far more experienced than their current project's few-month-long lifespan lets on but, nonetheless, to have found such an assured, cohesive sense of sound and intent after so relatively short a time is still a rare and wondrous thing.

That's a fact not lost on Hobbledehoy founder Tom Majerczak, who picked up the band on the back of a four-track demo and a gut feeling that they'd be worth the gamble.

"When singer/guitarist Dan Rogan reached out to us in December and shared a record four mates had self-recorded in a practice space, something clicked," Majerczak said in a statement in February.

As it turns out, he needn't have worried in the slightest; Brief Habits is a thoroughly enjoyable, impressively constructed debut effort from a band already starting to make waves on the live circuit following their first-ever show at Fat Louie's back in February, with an impending support slot for Ceres coming up in March and a spot on Tym Guitars' Record Store Day celebrations on Saturday 22 April.

They released their first single, The Ocean's Arms, in mid-January, following it just a few weeks later with A Defining Commitment, which swiftly scored airplay on triple j Unearthed. Their third single, Either/Or, arrived on 15 March, just a couple of days after the full-length's release, and is already accruing a pile of positive reviews.

The eight-track album was self-recorded "in a small industrial practice space on the outskirts of northern Brisbane", with mixing handled by J Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines, Government Issue) at Magpiecage, and mastering by Dan Coutant at Sun Room Audio.

Suffice to say, we hope it's just the first of many releases put out by these guys, because they're building something really special here, and it'd be undeniably lovely to see them reach the heights they deserve to as songwriters and performers.

Releases

Brief Habits — LP (Mar 2017)

Hear more tracks on Bandcamp.

Got an independent band? Got a Bandcamp page (y'know, because the title really doesn't work without it)?

Let us know if you want us to listen to your tunes, and you might get featured in a future edition of This One Time, On Bandcamp!