Inventions
Inventions are a rad Aussie band this is what they had to say to my questions.
- 1. For someone unfamiliar with your music, how would you describe the Inventions sound?
Like cookies and cream ice-cream. You have the familiar and reliable flavour of vanilla, but then the totally surprising and delicious crunchy bits! We’re a 5 piece alternative/punk rock band with a piano slammed in the middle. Our songs are generally quite dark, theatrical, and the right amount of dramatic. Super melodic vocals and unconventional, somewhat disturbing, lead guitars.
2. Tell us a little bit about your writing process. A peek inside the inner workings of the band if you will?
For our current set and first EP which was released in May this year, the majority of the songs were either fully or mostly written by Jake, and then the whole band workshopped them together to finish them and add the Inventions sparkle which is what makes our EP so unique. We actually have our own rehearsal and recording studio now, so recently we’ve been just setting up mics on all the gear, recording a great chorus idea or riff on guitar and then building on that- adding in drums and bass as we go. We have a pretty strong background in music production so working like this is super organic and keeps everything moving.
3. As far as breakout success is concerned, is it all about the strength of a song or does being in the right musical climate at the right time make all the difference?
Oh man that’s a big question! I think it goes without saying that a successful breakout song usually has to be really strong in all aspects. From the songwriting itself, the production, and keeping it musically and lyrically relevant whilst still being slightly ahead of the trend are all things that will create interest for the listener. There’s always so many exceptions though- if your music video is exciting enough to go crazy on the web, then maybe the song doesn’t have to be as strong.
4. How important is social media to you in regards to engaging with an audience?
We’ve had a lot of great things come out of using social media! Specifically Facebook and Twitter (follow us! @inventionsaus) have been host to many wonderful, deep, and interesting conversations with fans. Also by being able to post updates with photos and videos of us doing almost anything is a cool little reminder to our audience that we exist and are alive/active, which means that when we have something important to promote, people remember who we are and feel like they know us! Real life conversations at shows are still the most important and rewarding thing that we can do to keep in touch with our fans, and I don’t think that will ever change! Humans are far too social for that!
5. What inspired you to take music more seriously?
For all of us music has been a serious endeavour for the better part of our lives, but the big turning point for each of us was when we realised how much we love writing and performing music, and how dull the daily grind is compared to that!
6. What’s spinning on your playlist atm? Any guilty pleasures?
At the moment an incredible (and seriously unknown) US band called The Danger Bees have been on my playlist for a good 3 months straight. Ryan got a record player for the studio, so we’ve actually been listening to stuff on vinyl like Brand New and The Mars Volta, and William has been blasting some weird Gypsy band called Man Man.
7. Are you a fan of keeping the album format alive or do you think there’s more benefit to release singles or EPs with the influence of streaming platforms arguably shortening attention spans?
Thanks for asking this, I can’t count the amount of times I’ve heard that an artist or band is “going to release an EP of three songs every three or four months”. I haven’t seen it happen really successfully yet though. I think this is because there are two types of music listeners- the listener who will listen to one or two singles from that artist in a massive playlist filled with other singles, and the album listener. For the former, they generally only buy the singles anyway so don’t really care whether the artists has an 15 track album or a 4 track EP. The album listener on the other hand does care, and hearing the same 4 songs over and over again gets laborious and misses out on the ups and downs of an entire album. Aside from this, it’s more costly for a band to go into the studio 4 times a year rather than just the once, for the same amount of songs. There’s definitely more to talk about on this topic but I better leave it here, but yes we are all fans of the album format!
8. When not consumed with all things musical, what do you do tune out or reset?
Recently we’ve actually been going out to a place called Hanging Rock (you may have heard of/seen the movie) which is a beautiful place an hour or so out of Melbourne, where we can just be away from the city and hang out with the trees a bit! It helps us come back to ourselves and just relax without distraction. More commonly though we just hang out with our friends and play video games or watch shows and movies. Pretty standard simple stuff is the nicest way to chill out.
9. Your debut self titled EP ‘Inventions’ is doing the rounds now, what does the immediate future hold?
More than we can fit into our calendars! We’ve got a music video release for our track Shadows coming out, which was super fun to film by the way- we hired out a massive white room and sent confetti flying everywhere with my neighbours leaf blower, it looks awesome! The petrol fumes almost did us in though! We’re launching that, and our first national tour on October 2nd at The John Curtin Hotel in Melbourne. We’ll be trialling a ‘pay what you want’ ticket system, where our fans and friends can choose how much they want to pay for entry. We want to give everyone an opportunity to come, but also give people who want to really support us the chance to do so. Then we’ll be all over Australia playing shows for the next month including Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Sydney. And this is just the beginning, these next few months will be so much fun, we can’t wait to share it with fans new and old, we really want to encourage anyone to send us a message us if you like our music, you’re coming to a show, or just want to chat!
10. Lastly, Prince or Michael Jackson?
MJ!
Inventions self-titled EP out now via all good digital retailers.
