nipaluna/Hobart founded, ARIA-nominated and internationally-acclaimed rollickers A. Swayze & The Ghosts today announce their highly anticipated second studio album ‘Let’s Live a Life Better Than This’ (October 25) and share new single + video ‘He Is Dead’. Chronicling 4 years of growth, ‘Let’s Live a Life Better Than This’ documents a transition from self-destruction to love – the rhythmic record owing its unique melange of influences as the band embraced the idea that “every sound was available” in a remarkably intense evolution of their sonic world. ‘Let’s Live a Life Better Than This’ also features recent single ‘Cool Cucumber’ – with the band selling out 3x launch shows in support of their return – and is available to pre-order digitally and on vinyl now HERE. ‘He Is Dead’ is out everywhere now – stream HERE.
Driven by crisp drums and crunchy guitar with 70s dance-punk embellishments, ‘He Is Dead’ wrestles with ideas of false idols, consumerism, a fear of the future and questioning ideals held in the past. While writing ‘He Is Dead’ the band’s enigmatic frontman Andrew Swayze abandoned his previous self-described habit of overthinking, signifying a newfound lyrical freedom that echoes the ethos of recent “Bowie-punk” offering ‘Cool Cucumber’. Swayze shares, “The lyrics for ‘He Is Dead’ came to me like a bolt from the heavens. I was playing around with a loop I made from one of Ben’s demos that had a guitar progression on top of a LinnDrum groove. I hit record and the entire first verse came out immediately – that’s often how I write lyrics: ad-lib and allow whatever melodies and words bubble out of my subconscious. It’s only recently that I’ve allowed myself to keep them rather than overthink it. Interestingly, I’ve found that the meaning of these ramblings often becomes apparent later on in the process. There’s something mystical about that to me.”
Of the track’s “best in show”-meets-dystopian-Gogglebox-episode clip – directed, filmed, and edited by Swayze and starring Cora the dog – he adds: “We shot the music video in a couple of hours before we had to arrive at a soundcheck. It was still light out, so we had to board up every window in my rental, and Cora kept wandering into the shots as we filmed ourselves watching television. The process was actually quite meditative: sitting in silence watching the same nonsense scenes over and over. I suppose that’s exactly what a lot of us spend our time doing throughout our lives, but without the meditation and without noticing.”
Written over four years between Naarm/Melbourne and secluded spots across lutruwita/Tasmania and recorded at Sunset Pig Studios, with Swayze tracking the bulk of his vocals in his spare toilet/DIY soundbooth, ‘Let’s Live a Life Better Than This’ – self-produced in a first for the band and mixed by Andy Savours (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rina Sawayama, Arctic Monkeys) – is the dawning of a new era for A. Swayze & the Ghosts. Densely packed with tight, punchy drums and percussion, Roland and Korg synths and a touch of saxophone, the guitar-led, dance-forward record signifies a zealous transformation, brimming with a renewed energy and intensity, non-traditional rock elements and an unwavering sense of passion and commitment. It marks a departure from their previous “band-in-a-room” approach to writing to now writing in the production process, initially spurred due to their rehearsal space lease ending & having “nowhere to make noise.” This ultimately encouraged a far more experimental approach as the band honed the nuances of each track, thanks to access to a limitless range of DAW sounds and a growing curiosity of genres like techno, electro, hardcore, trap, and black metal, adopting the ethos that “if something sounds good, don’t question it.”
After recently returning from a touring hiatus, the band turned inwards to reflect on their place and found themselves, for the first time, shedding their old ideals to make music free from community expectations, driven by the urgency of liberating from the creative boundaries they had subconsciously drawn for themselves. The 10 tracks on ‘Let’s Live A Life Better Than This’ show a extroverted record that is largely introspective, chronicling shared personal realisations around fear, mental health, trauma, addiction, love, loss and finding a path to liberation & resolution in parallel to an oftentimes challenging journey of growth that Andrew Swayze says was intrinsic to the album’s creation: “To us, the two are intertwined – without one, the other would cease to have existed. We started as a fierce, self-destructive garage-punk band, reeling from their career being derailed by covid, to a thoughtful and artistically liberated group held together by love and respect for one another.”
First making their mark with their “end to end faultless” (The Observer), ARIA & AIR Award-nominated debut album ‘Paid Salvation’ (2020), A. Swayze & The Ghosts – Andrew Swayze (he/him; vocals), Ben von Fürstenburg (he/him; guitar/synth), Zac Blain (he/him; drums) and touring members Kieran Daly (he/him; guitar) and Joe Berry (he/him; bass) – continually push the bounds of what it is to be “punk”, and are heralded for their frenetic live shows marked by the unrivalled charisma of Andrew Swayze, and their highly expressive and consistent creative output. Across their debut self-titled EP (2017) and ‘Paid Salvation’ (2020), A. Swayze & The Ghosts, have become critically-acclaimed internationally, including nominations for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album (ARIA Awards) and Best Independent Punk Album or EP (AIR Awards), praise from The Guardian (UK), MOJO, BBC Radio 1, Beats One, CLASH and NME, Feature Album on Double J, Album of the Week on The Music, The AU Review and MTV Australia, and syncs on the recent remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 & 2 Soundtrack (‘Connect To Consume’). They’ve taken their “unpredictable, risky and unhinged” (triple j) live show to Splendour In The Grass, Falls Festival, The Great Escape (UK) and Bigsound among others, plus support slots with Jet, The Vines, Shame (UK), Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes (UK), Total Control and more.
‘Let’s Live a Life Better Than This’ Tracklisting:
Tell You All The Time
Anthropology
He Is Dead
Easy Come
Sick Kinda WRLD
Cool Cucumber
Others Exist
Friends
Puppy, Baby
Before I Left
Connect with A. Swayze & The Ghosts:
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aswayzeandtheghosts.com
