Kingswood

AFTER SLOGGING IT OUT FOR A DECADE TO ESTABLISH THEMSELVES AS ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S BIGGEST AND BEST ROCK BANDS, KINGSWOOD HAVE CUT THEMSELVES FREE FROM THE TIES OF EXPECTATION WEIGHING THEM DOWN. THE END RESULT IS THEIR LOOSEST, LOUDEST AND MOST LOVEABLE ALBUM YET.

After kicking down the walls of the Australian pub scene with the raw, punchy rock ’n’ roll spirit of 2014’s Microscopic

Wars, Kingswood set their sights to the world and, armed with a groovier, more electronically intoned pop-rock slant, made a monolith of themselves in 2017’s acclaimed AfterHours,CloseToDawn.

And though it showed a major stylistic shift for the Melbourne-native foursome, the album proved an instant hit with fans and critics alike. Before long, Kingswood were a household name, any venue they’d plaster on a tour poster sold out before the presales could end…

And then they found themselves in a creative ditch. Throughout the bulk of 2018, the band wrote two albums worth of material, both of which they saw enough value in to draft up release plans. But each time they got close to the finish line, they’d step back, look at the material and decide, “This isn’t right.” There was an elongated stretch of existential crises for the band, where it seemed

like a worthy follow-up to AfterHours would never materialise. That was until they were booked for a few one-off shows in Europe circa mid-2019, and in the process of digging through their catalogue to write a setlist, rekindled a love for the heavier, more guitar-driven bangers of their early releases.

“We felt that juvenile energy that you get when you first pick up a guitar and buy your first drive pedal or amp,” lead shredder Alex Laska gushes, “And you just dive in and you’re like, ‘Yes!’ It’s loud and it’s rebellious and it pisses off your parents, and it’s beautiful. And we just fell back in love with that. We were like, ‘That’s it, that’s the soul of this band – what are we doing trying to be clever?’ I guess because we’d been going to the right for so long, we wanted to pull really hard to the left. You spend pretty much your whole life cultivating your first album, and it gets released and you get recognised for it, but people don’t realise that you spent the entirety of your musical education and development getting to that point. The last thing you want to do is go and do all of that again, y’know? I wanted to get away from that so much that I forgot why I loved it in the first place.”

For his first few shots at writing for Kingswood’s third album, Laska searched for inspiration in a suitcase; he’d completed writing sessions everywhere from Berlin to New York to London, desperate to squeeze influence out of scenery.

But the wide-eyed excitement of touring the world hardly translated to good music. It was when he teamed up with frequent collaborator and producer Eddie Spear that he found his creativity start to blossom again. The album that would become

Juveniles (named so for the aforementioned energy Kingswood felt when it clicked what they were searching for) was ultimately written between Melbourne and their second home of Nashville (where Spear is based), the homeliness of their surroundings helping to light their spark.

“It was that combined with the shows in Germany where we found ourselves again,” Laska admits. “Songwriting became very much like a diary and a self-help guide for ourselves. Being grounded there helped us realise who we were and what we were doing, and really challenged the songs and challenged why we were writing them, and whether we actually loved them.

And then when we finally pieced it together, we realised, ‘ This feels good because it’s come from one place.’ It wasn’t frenetically designed through circumstance, like, ‘Oh, we’re in Berlin today, let’s book a studio for the afternoon,’ or, ‘We’ve got a few days in Brisbane next month, let’s try to write a song there.’”

When you first pop your copy of Juveniles down on the turntable (this is assuming you’re all aboard the Vinyl Revival Express), you’ll notice just how much Kingswood have fallen back in love with the guitar. Though bright and bouncy as their poppiest cuts, album no. three is a six-string serenade through and through. If you’d ever questioned Kingswood’s validity as a rock band before now,

Juveniles serves to whip a metaphorical glove against your cheek. And as Laska gushes to

AustralianGuitar (who else better to?), he’s always wanted to indulge his inner rifflord as such.

“I love the guitar,” he says with a distinct bluntness. “I’ve loved it since the first time I saw

BackToTheFuture as a kid, when Marty grabs the 335 at the end. I didn’t know what it was, but I just loved it and I loved the sound it made – especially when he starts to ramp it up. I remember being four or five years old and hearing the blues, and not knowing what the hell it was but that it just moved me so much. Discovering the sound of pentatonics and how they can be manipulated… I was always drawn to it in such an intense, spiritual way.”

If he hadn’t warmed up to us before, diving into the arsenal of gear Laska used to record Juveniles has him buzzing like a tween after one too many red cordials. In addition to a pile of pedals that would make any self-respecting gear nerd’s eyelids twinkle, the band found themselves pulling from an impossibly impressive collection of axes.

“I fell massively in love with Gibson again,” Laska declares, spinning off into a lengthy anecdote of his adoration towards (and momentary lapse from) the iconic brand. “It’s where I started off. My first guitar was an SG, and then my most prized possession was a VOS Custom Shop Les Paul – a ’58 Plaintop in Iced Tea that ended up being stolen. Our studio got robbed, and I had five amazing guitars stolen – an old Kalamazoo from the ‘60s, a Custom Shop Roy Orbison 335, two Les Pauls and a Goldtop. It was a massive blow for me, because my guitars are so personal and they all have their own history, their own name and all of that. They’re like friends to me – they’re extensions of who I am.

“I’d always hated Strats, but when all of those Gibsons got stolen, I was like, ‘Alright, there’s gotta be something about Strats that I’m just not seeing. Everyone loves them, blah, blah, blah” – and then I went deep into Strat world. I’ve got, like, eight or nine Strats now. But then when we played those shows in Germany and Austria, I was given this satin-like wine red Gibson 335 hollowbody, and I was just like, ‘Man, this feels great!’ It just had this mojo to it. So I went home and I started to pull out all my other Gibsons; at the time I had a ’59 reissue Les Paul, a Goldtop and a ’56, two 330s – an old one and a new one – a 335, an R6, an R8 and an R9.

“I fell in love with humbuckers again, and then serendipitously, Gibson started back up in Australia. I was like, ‘Man, this has to be a sign!’ So I called up C hris Taylor, who’s their new director, and we just got on like a house on fire. I don’t think he even knew who the band was, but he’s a total guitar guy in the same w ay that I am, and we just spoke for hours. We became instant friends, and he invited me to the Custom Shop in Nashville when we were recording there – he was there for an event or something, and I got to go in and pick my own tops out for some replacement guitars. I got to walk through the factory and choose everything, and I ended up with the most amazing pieces.

“I got this custom white Firebird with aged gold humbuckers, and a ’62 ES-335 Block – lightly aged, one of four ever made. I was able to buy it all with the insurance money from all my robbed gear, which was amazing. And that’s what you hear on the album. You’re hearing the R9, which is a reissue VOS from the Custom Shop; you’re hearing my

Roy Orbison 335, which is in the video clip for ‘Say You Remember’; you’re hearing an ES-275, which is just one of the most beautiful guitars I’ve ever seen, and that’s in the video clip for ‘Bittersweet’; you’re hearing the R6, the R8 and the ’66 330, and then just a little bit of Jazzmaster – this beautiful

Jazzmaster that I picked up in Nashville.”