VacationsNewcastle favourites Vacations announced some great news over the weekend: their third album is complete.
Posting a photo of a very sleepy-looking Campbell Burns pointing at a computer to social media, the band captioned the picture, “album iii is done”.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Vacations, the band have been smashing out songs since 2015 to become one of Australia's biggest indie-rock bands.
Their single Young became a viral hit, which, in June, was sitting on over 420 million streams on Spotify alone. Proof that a band can convert viral success into an actual and global fan base, Vacations backed up the victory with Telephones from their debut 2018 album Changes, which gained over 230 million Spotify streams.
Formed in 2016, Vacations have always been a DIY affair, with members Campbell Burns, Jake Johnson, Nate Delizzotti, and Joseph Van Lier starting small and building to their major success.
One of the songs we might hear on Vacations LP3 is Next Exit, which was released in April 2023.
On the new single, Burns commented in a press release, “It was one of the first songs I started writing for the next album. I was at a recording studio in Austin during our first (sold-out) US tour and just had the intro. The idea sat with me for a few months, and I’d keep revisiting it, trying to see if I could interpret something new. There was one session where everything clicked.
“Songwriting is therapeutic in that sense; sometimes I don’t entirely understand it, and I need to just sit with it for a moment to take it all in.” He added, “Conceptually, it takes on the idea of being stuck in a loop of repetitive behaviour. Feeling stagnant and unsure of the future ahead.
“You could easily draw this to us as a band navigating COVID or on a more personal level with relationships between friends or romantic partners. I always like the idea of multiple interpretations. You can have your own meaning, and I can have mine. Together, we still connect over the music.”
In November 2022, Vacations opened up to The Music’s Bryget Chrisfield and revealed that they’d found “greater longevity” overseas than if they’d only relied on triple j. You can find out more about the international success they’ve found here.
