Five Songs That Inspired The Great Emu War Casualties

The title of The Great Emu War Casualties latest single doubles as a stylistic overview for the group. The track’s called ‘Modern Indie Spacecats’, which, given the Melbourne/Naarm trio’s affection for artists like Everything Everything and Bombay Bicycle Club, is an on-the-money descriptor.

The band’s vocalist, Joe Jackson (no, not that one, or that one), describes ‘Modern Indie Spacecats‘ as a retaliation against the neoliberal squeeze. “The world is drying up and everyone is working all the time and nobody actually owns anything anymore,” he says. Jackson and his band mates Saskia Clapton and Bibek Tamang round up five tracks that influenced ‘Modern Indie Spacecats’.

The Great Emu War Casualties on five songs that influenced ‘Modern Indie Spacecats’

Nothing But Thieves – ‘Unperson’

Saskia was spamming Moral Panic a lot when she wrote the music bed for ‘Modern Indie Spacecats’ in Sydney hotel COVID lockdown. It’s a really great album. We came relatively late to the Nothing But Thieves party as we spent a lot of time being into wanky pretentious bullshit music. So it was nice to just listen to a relatively straightforward rock band that sounded great. It reminded us that it is alright to write something that was just verse-chorus with like one riff and not try too hard.

Mucc – ‘Timer’

Saskia loves this band so much, although she will never tell anyone that (except for you, Music Feeds). Their output is definitely a mixed bag – it’s a weird mish-mash of genres, which only sometimes works, but they just go for it anyway. We like to follow that ethos. ‘Timer’ has this cheesy bassline and huge epic chorus that goes even bigger right at the end, and we were definitely trying to replicate something like that here.

Major Lazer – ‘Blaze Up the Fire’

It may feel like a super random inclusion on this list – which it is – but if you listen to the beat, and especially the build-ups, you can definitely hear that influence in Bibek’s drums. We all write our parts separately and it’s always a total surprise what the others come up with. Some people don’t like that, but we’ve found that best for our creative process. It prevents us from ending up sounding like a rehash of something that’s gone before. Hopefully.

Interpol – ‘Fine Mess’

Whenever Saskia comes up with an idea, Joe says it sounds like Interpol, mostly because she can only play single notes on the guitar and they do that quite often. On ‘Modern Indie Spacecats’, he tried to sing like Interpol to prove it. What we basically found is either Saskia’s stuff doesn’t sound like Interpol or Joe can’t really sing like Interpol. Either way, we’re happy we didn’t end up churning out a tribute song. We picked ‘Fine Mess’ because we thought the vocal effect was super gross and had asked Cal Barter, our mixing engineer, to attempt to replicate it.

Everything Everything – ‘Supernormal’

We are all huge Everything Everything fans. We don’t really write music like them, but they are still a huge influence on us generally speaking. ‘SUPERNORMAL’ is a bit more aggressive and in-your-face than some of their other releases and on reflection we think we were pushing for a similar vibe on ‘Modern Indie Spacecats’.