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DAILY WORKOUTS, ICE BATHS AND BREATHWORK HELP AUSSIE OUTFIT STAY GROUNDED IN HECTIC MUSIC WORLD
With a chart-topping album, seven ARIA nominations, a Grammy and more than 150,000 tickets sold for their longawaited homecoming tour, there are very few Aussie outfits – if any – that can match the trajectory of Rufus Du Sol in 2022.
With one foot planted firmly in the world of synth-heavy dance and the other in soaring stadium rock, the crossover kings are perhaps the best realised and most successful live outfit to emerge from a proud Aussie tradition that began during the electronic explosion of the early noughties with the likes of Infusion, Nubreed, Cut Copy and The Presets.
And while the Sydney trio are no doubt informed by the aforementioned luminaries, Tyrone Lindqvist, Jon George, and James Hunt have blazed their own path and now take this Aussie sound to a whole new global audience and become bona fide superstars in the process.
Checking in from Nashville before they return home after no less than four pandemic-induced false starts, Hunt says the one thing that has been missing from the winning equation was Australia.
“It’s been crazy and I guess, we’ve been very lucky over the years to have had different accomplishments, win awards, sell out shows in Australia at increasing sizes and then come to the US and have success over here, but (before the pandemic) we’ve always been able to come back every couple of months to Australia,” Hunt says.
“It definitely feels surreal that we’ve been away for so long. We’ve written an entire record, built an entirely new live show, and we’ve been lucky enough to win a Grammy. All these amazing life events have occurred, but really I’m just mostly excited to come home and see my friends and family and just reconnect, as opposed to just doing Zoom catch-ups or Facetime calls, and actually just spend some time in my home city in Sydney.
“I think just sitting in an Australian back yard with my family (is what I’m looking forward to most), there’s no back yards in LA, not where I live anyway. I can’t wait to just be sitting there, drinking a coffee with my family with the cockatoos coming in. I have a pretty strong vision of what that morning will be like.”
Reconnection is a key theme in their Australian No.1 effort Surrender, the band’s fourth longplayer and the first written after packing up and moving to the US full time.
It’s no secret the band struggled with the excesses of fame and touring during their last record and before putting pen to paper on anything new, Hunt says it was clear they needed to take it back to basics before they could run the gauntlet again.
“We’d been going so hard, driving ourselves into the ground touring, we had no sense of self-care or routine or structure.We were touring relentlessly through 2019, but by the end of it I was definitely very burnt out and disconnected from myself,” he says.
“When the lockdown started happening, we were in LA and we had two weeks planned at this studio out in Joshua Tree and that turned into two months, where we just stayed out there.
“It ended up being very therapeutic and we were able to flesh out some old wounds and resentments and really connect and have real conversations, uncomfortable ones as well.
“I think that was key to finding the fun and playfulness in writing again, which is where all the best stuff comes from for us, when we’re in a state of play and we’re just flowing and there’s less care factor.
“It was hard to feel that when we were not really connected and not feeling like we were friends. It wasn’t bad or hostile, we just weren’t in sync like we had been.”
The time locked away has resulted in a fresh, revitalised Rufus Du Sol, one that operates less like a trio of mad rock stars and more like a finely tuned sports team.
“These days we bring a trainer on the road with us, our creative director Alex is travelling with us, we have a core crew, our girlfriends travel with us when they can. It’s its own little ecosystem and we’ve introduced a lot of structure,” he says.
“Every single day we start with a workout with our trainer; we’re lucky enough we can afford to bring our trainer on tour with us now, which is very much a luxury but it has made such a difference to our mental health.
“We start each day with a workout, go get a meal together, we have an ice bath, we do breathwork before we go on stage.
“We have found a lot of techniques and an entire toolkit of ways to stay grounded and remind each other of what we want out of a tour, which is feeling stable and good.
“I’ve found it very easy to not even stray from that. I feel locked in and it feels like we’re more of a sports team as opposed to a band, or the stereotype of a band, which is what we explored heavily for the first eight years. Every night is a celebration, so you can get lost in it. These days I feel very centred and it’s really helped the performance, we’re playing the best shows when we’re super optimised and super present.”
Rufus Du Sol, Brisbane Showgrounds, Nov 26; The Domain, Sydney, Dec 2 (sold out), 3; Ellis Park, Adelaide, Dec 10; Flemington Racecourse, Dec 15 (sold out), 16; Langley Park, Perth, Dec 17. Tickets rufusdusol.com