We’re doing things our way
THE AUSTRALIAN BAND DECLARE THEIR INDEPENDENCE ON NEW ALBUM ‘LO LA RU’
The five-piece alt-rock group may be playing in front of thousands as part of the Australian leg of Pink’s Beautiful Trauma tour (see box), but the band from small-town Menangle, NSW, decided to go underground—spending six weeks in a WWII communications bunker in nearby Camden—to record LO LA RU, their third album (out now). “Our friend lives in it and has been renovating it for years,” songwriter and keyboardist Elliott Margin, 25, tells WHO. “It was like our own little world.”
In the wider world, LO LA RU comes three years after the release of Hoops, the title track of which scored the band the No. 1 spot in Triple J’s Hottest 100 songs for 2015. Despite that success, The Rubens—brothers Sam, Elliott and Zaac Margin, along with Scott Baldwin and William Zeglis—say they didn’t let the pressure to repeat affect them.
“It was funny because we’d been getting pushed in more classic rock ’n’ roll directions over the last two records,” says lead vocalist Sam, 29. “Then ‘Hoops’ just came out of nowhere, that one track, and then it was the most successful song and it was the least rock-y, it was like, ‘Oh, see?’ So we felt the freedom because of that song to go down this direction.”
The Rubens have headed towards a more hip-hop and R&b–infused sound. “We’d been trying to move away from rock since we started the band,” Sam concedes. “Our R&B roots sometimes got watered down by our American record label or outside pressures, mainly from overseas, and when we came into this new record, we decided we were going to do things more our way.”
Guiding them were Run the Jewels producer-collaborators Wilder Zoby and Torbitt Schwartz. Although Elliott says the thought of the New Yorkers travelling to Australia to produce their album was “ridiculous,” the pair had already heard LO LA RU’S first track, “Million Man”, and were keen to be involved. They made the trip to rural Camden and “they loved it,” says Elliott. “They really embraced the Australian lifestyle—they ate lamingtons and drank VB.”
Reminiscing, Sam says, “It was fun because it wasn’t really like bringing out this one outsider. You bring in two outsiders who are brothers who we’ve known on and off for a couple of years, so it was just like groups of friends hanging out and making music, which was really helpful.”
That communal feeling turned the bunker—a private recording studio—into a home. “It’s a very tight-knit friendship group that is allowed to rehearse there and we wanted to represent that in the title of
the album,” says Sam of LO LA RU. “We had the idea like, ‘ Why don’t we use the title of the album to represent this little world we had where we could just create and have fun?” adds Elliott. “And then why doesn’t the artwork be the flag for this place?”
The Rubens, who arrived on the music scene in 2012, remain “super tight,” says Sam. “I don’t feel like anything’s changed. Some of us have gotten married and some of us have babies on the way.” The last point refers to the singer’s own January wedding to model Rosie Tupper, 26, who is now expecting a baby girl in early August.
After the Pink tour, the band still hopes to spend the rest of their year on the road. “[It] depends what comes up overseas,” admits Sam, “but I’d like to do another Australian tour.”