Loon Lake Give Us A Track By Track Rundown Of Final Album ‘Low Res’

Aussie outfit Loon Lake are just about to sadly pack up shop as a band and ride that horse into the proverbial sunset with a final album and tour. Sadface, right? Low Res is their last ever release and we got the soon to be departed band to runs us through the tracks, where they came from and what they truly mean.

MARIA

Maria is a fictitious tale of someone trying to be something they’re not, to impress / garnet someone else’s attention. I would say at some point in life everyone can personify this situation.

The songs impetus came about from the first line ‘I got a new haircut / I got a new style’ – that’s a line about someone I know, but then the rest of it is just embellishment.

JUST NOW

This song was written and recorded within 2 hours. We were in the studio and Nick went into another room with an acoustic guitar and started the chord progression. I walked in and heard him kind of humming this melody and I sort of heard it backwards and started dribbling lyrics and the melody started to pop out. It was just “your heart, my hands”.

So we decided to keep the lyrics honest and heart felt because it felt cheesy and the song lost its purity the other way. So I wrote the lyrics using parts of the day before, and we jammed the song and whatever came out, we used little bits of this and that and with help from the others on phrases here and there it just kind of formed itself.

With some time I’ve realised the song is about someone else having control of your dreams and all the responsibility that comes with that. Sometimes no matter what, people have power over you and the lyric “my heart, your hands / you need to take some care” pretty much sums up the whole meaning of the song. The rest I want to be open and for people to find whatever they want it to be.

Watch: Loon Lake – Just Now

THE DREAM

The Dream was another song written and recorded in the studio within a couple of hours. Nick came up with the chord progression and maybe even part of the melody, I can’t remember. But we just built it all quickly, a lot like Just Now.

The idea for the song lyrics came to me from a dream. It was something I just wrote in my iPhone notes, all I remember about the dream was the part about getting up for a drink and touching someone’s hand and then chasing after a dog in the park. I then just built on the story and had the idea to make the story about a dream. So basically the character wakes up at the end of the song and realizes it was all a dream. It’s a feel good song with a bit of a sad twist, kind of a dream within a dream.

DARK BLACK EYES

This song is one of my favourites for sure. To me it has that whole band vibe, everyone playing a part. Kind of like Bad To Me, its got a rolling groove and all the sum of parts etc

The topic is taboo! Its all about lust, temptation, forbidden stuff. Im not going to go much further into it.

RADIATOR

Nick wrote the demo for this it was just a riff and beat. I first heard it walking thru the airport once on the way to somewhere on tour and I loved it. We have had the demo, it was called ‘Rockstars’ for probably a year, we all loved it but we couldn’t find anything. Trouble was I tried every single thing I could, but could never find a good melody. Every time I did the others rejected it.

Then one late night recently it came on in my iTunes when I was drawing pictures and I thought what I needed to do was to find a story. So I wrote all these verses about different girls I had met over the years, funny little stories about them and put it together to make it into one imaginary girl. Then it just came together.

Listen: Loon Lake – Radiator

GIRLFRIEND

The story for this song was born from a story a friend told me about not ever wanting a girlfriend but was going on loads of Tinder dates and had met a girl that was wrapped in him. She said that she “only wanted a boyfriend during summer” I just found it interesting and just kinda babbled lyrics and whatever came out came out.

We pretty much wrote this whole song in the studio, all I had was the chords and lyrics “don’t you want a girlfriend”. Everyone had their own ideas and the big part in the middle, “Poisonous you won’t recover” came out of no where and I really love it. I kept thinking about the Killers, something sounded like them, the song just took shape, wrote itself.

BLUE SKIES

This was written a long, long time ago on an classical guitar in a hotel room on the Goldy. I always liked it but like a lot of songs it was always brought into practice, we couldn’t find a way to play it and we would give up. Then I would find it again going through iPhone recordings and get interested in it. I tried a full demo myself and came up with this idea I kind of lifted from a Bloc Party song. Alternating guitars, on either side of the mix on the up and down beats to make one line.

The story was a pretty much about a girl I had a crush on that was pretty blasé and only called me when she felt like it. She wasn’t into it and was obviously out on the town, it was just extrapolated and imaginary, well most of it. I really love the way this song makes me feel and I think we are really tight as a band and I’m proud of it.

Watch: Loon Lake – Surfin’

SURFIN’

I wrote Surfin’ late 2014 just after my son Alby was born. I working a lot and I wasn’t able to get in the water much. It was a simple iPhone recording, and all I had was “all I wanna do is go surfing” and I showed the boys at practice. Nick instantly liked it so we just jammed it out. We had made a plan to return to how we used to do things, to just jam out to anything that seemed like fun. I remember just thinking about a character in my head, he doesn’t care and is kinda shit at stuff, but just thinks about Saturday night. So I based the lyrics around that character.

For me this song captures everything good about Loon Lake. It’s the first recording with Ricky – he drummed so well, him and Timmy really locked in on the bass. Its just us all over, the way we always used to do things. We found the charm in our sound and I’m excited.

HONEY BABY

This song is is the only one that was actually recorded at Sing Sing and a lot earlier than the others. After our first album release, and the fact no one gave a fuck about it, I decided i wanted to go back to old school garage and wrote this pretty quickly. It’s a punk song, it has no real story. It was all imaginary. I often get ideas from the plots of shit TV shows or movies and then just make more of them. This could have been an episode of Home and Away.

Our plan was to put a single out soon after the album as we didn’t get much traction with it and so we hired sing sing and a totally different producer and just went in for a day and went for it. For some reason when we got the mix back, it just wasn’t how we wanted it and the idea just died. The song just got pushed aside and we forgot about it. It wasn’t until we started to form this album that we realised the whole aesthetic matched really well with the rest of the songs. So we got Tony to remix it and that was that.

It’s no Stairway to Heaven, it’s a fast fun punk song and we loved the accidental fuck up in the middle so we just kept it in.

WINONA RYDER

This song I would have to say is our swan song. I wrote this pretty much fully as a demo and the final recording didn’t really change much. Nick added some magic to the guitars. It was a rock song, fairly different to the rest of the punky 2 min garage songs on the rest of the album.

I really don’t know where it came from, it was one of those songs that seemed to be already written, almost felt like i had heard it all before and I think that is always a really good sign.

For me it’s what the song is about that’s the most important thing. The idea for the title Winona Ryder is from a poster that I remember was in a friends bedroom when I was young. I used to stare at it, I think it was Reality Bites? I looked at it and thought about actors and famous people and just, well, posters. Having them on your wall or going out and becoming your own poster. I think that’s what we did. We were just normal dudes that had a crack at it and got some success, however small.

The outro is “posters instead? Winona Ryder posters instead? Winona Ryder”, so it’s like, either go out and do it, or stare at posters of other people doing it.

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Loon Lake’s swan song tour is heading around the country as we speak, grab all the deets and ticket links below! Stream Low Res in full right here.

Final Wave Tour Dates

Friday, 9th October

Jack Rabbit Slims, Perth WA

Tickets: Loon Lake

Saturday, 10th October

UniBar, Adelaide SA

Tickets: Loon Lake

Friday, 30th October

The Cambridge, Newcastle NSW

Tickets: Loon Lake

Saturday, 31st October

Newtown Social, Sydney NSW

Tickets: Loon Lake

Friday, 6th November

The Brightside, Brisbane QLD

Tickets: Loon Lake

Saturday, 7th November

Sol Bar, Sunshine Coast QLD

Tickets: Loon Lake

Saturday, 14th November

The Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC

Tickets: Loon Lake