MUSIC, STAGE AND SCREEN

Taking a different approach to their new album has paid off handsomely for Brisbane four-piece Jungle Giants, as their hard-working frontman tells Shaun McManus

“WORKING nine to five, what a way to make a living ...’’ They’re not Jungle Giants lyrics, but frontman Sam Hales could be forgiven for plagiarising Dolly Parton after changing his style to do just that to produce the band’s third album.

The Brisbane-based indie fourpiece are headed for Hobart soon on the back of releasing Quiet

Ferocity this month. While Parton lamented the daily grind, Hales has embraced it.

“I spent a year doing a nine-to-five writing this record, as opposed to in the past writing here and there during the week or four hours on a Saturday living in a house with seven people,” Hales told Pulse.

“This time around it was like an underground writing room, just me, no one could hear me, and I was doing this nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, and it was f--ing awesome.

“It was a whole new way of doing things, and for me it was a way for me to just figure out exactly how I like to do things.

“It kind of made time slow down, and it made me explore production in all kinds of new ways.”

The band, featuring Sam Hales on vocals/guitar, Cesira Aitken on lead guitar, Andrew Dooris on bass guitar and backing vocals, and Keelan Bijker on drums and trombone, first performed together in 2011. The recent release of Quiet

Ferocity follows The Jungle Giants’ debut album, Learn to Exist, which dropped in 2013, and Speakerzoid, which came out it 2015.

Hales says the band didn’t set out to go in a different direction after Speakerzoid, but that’s the way their first self-produced album panned out, from production to sound.

“For us, it’s a completely new thing,” he said.

“We try a new thing every record, you could say. We’ve done all kinds of different ways of recording records and writing records, but in every sense this one is completely different.”

Given the amount of time that was put into the album, the band naturally had a “whole bunch” of

excess songs, but Hales said it wasn’t a laborious process to whittle it down to a final 10.

“It just felt like the songs that were going to be on the record were shining out, and kind of cast a shadow on everything else,” he said.

“It doesn’t mean that everything else was not good. It was just that those songs had a fluidity to them, they sounded like they were all from the same record, and that was the thing we were looking for.”

Hales made a playlist of the songs earmarked for the album and listened to it over and over, which ultimately led to the creation of one final, killer track.

“Without judging the record, I was trying to picture ‘Is there too much of something or is it missing something, and if it is missing something, what is it?’,” he said.

“From doing that so many times, I got this image, like a flavour in mind, and I was like ‘OK, I feel like something is missing’.

“I went to the studio the next day and I just smashed out Bad

Dream in two hours, it was done, and I was like ‘F--- yeah, this is exactly what the record needed’.”

The rest of the band agreed, and the song became “the full stop on the sentence of this record”.

With the recording complete, all that was left to do was release it to the public.

While he says there is always a risk of a backlash when releasing new music, Hales said the reaction to the album had been “awesome”.

“It’s been so much better than we could have expected,’’ he said.

“There’s always these people when you put something out and they hate it. They go on Facebook or something and give you the meanest comment in the whole world and it hurts so hard, and we always get that.

“With this one I haven’t seen a really bad comment. I feel like everyone is genuinely into it, which feels so good because we genuinely are as well.”

Hales hinted that The Jungle Giants’ new sound could be sticking around.

“We keep saying among us this is definitely the sound ... we really want to stay here and keep exploring this sound, as opposed to going to something different,” he said. Given his love for Quiet

Ferocity, Hales is pumped to come and play it in Tasmania.

“Tasmania is just beautiful, I find the people all so relaxing,” he said. “It’s a really cool place, and for us we always have to put it [Tasmania] on the tour list because it’s always such a good time.

“I feel like we don’t get there enough, but every tour we just try and smash on a couple of tour dates so we can actually get there.”

The Jungle Giants play at the Republic Bar in North Hobart on September 8 from 10pm. It is an 18+ event. Tickets are $37 from moshtix.com.au