DMA’s have been billed as a “buzz band” so many times you’d think ‘buzz’ was some kind of new, obscure indie genre that only exists in the blogosphere. But it’s not surprising once you consider the band’s quick rise to prominence.
Or so it would all seem. Indeed, the band managed to sell out their first run of gigs without having released an EP. And when we say their first run of gigs, we mean the first time the three members had ever appeared on a stage together.
The three members of DMA’s — Matt Mason, Tommy O’Dell, and Johnny Took — were all live music veterans who’d played in dozens of bands together and separately, but DMA’s was a project that only existed in Took’s bedroom.
“Maybe we’d thought in the back of our minds that we’d like to bypass some of the channels that we’d already struggled with in the past,” O’Dell tells Rolling Stone. “Like driving to Melbourne 20 times a year and playing to one person.”
“One time we went to Ballarat with the psych band Tommy and I were in and we actually played a really good show, but we literally played in front of the bartender, the sound guy and the door chick,” adds Took.
“It was just the three of us, and we were all playing in other bands and getting that live fix, so we were happy with just recording,” says O’Dell. The three would record demos at Took’s house and then share them online where an organic fan base was developing.
Eventually, the band signed to Sydney label I OH YOU, sending their now signature single, ‘Delete’, on to the triple j airwaves and turning the three Newtown boys into one of the most talked-about bands to come out of Australia.
Sure, there was always the chatter about how they looked and sounded like Oasis and Mason even reveals to Rolling Stone that there was at one point a rumour that the three of them had been put together by a record label a la the Backstreet Boys.
But the trio was too busy flying overseas to complete sold-out US, UK, and European tours and make appearances at prestigious festivals like our own Laneway, as well as Reading and Leeds Festival, where they were rapturously received.
But according to the band, who released their long-awaited debut album, Hills End, last month, being a “buzz band” isn’t exactly a champagne and caviar affair, and at the end of the day, they’re still just a group of up-and-coming musicians.
While the boys admit they managed to get a lot of attention early on without so much as playing a gig, everything that’s transpired since the release of ‘Delete’ has been a hard slog, the kind any band on the come-up goes through.
“We’ve been touring the EP all around the world,” O’Dell tells Rolling Stone. “Laying the ground work… It’s been hard but fun, but still working, working hard. And it’s pretty unglamorous.”
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Despite receiving the kind of press most up-and-coming bands could only dream of, O’Dell explains, “I’ve had to share a bed with our tour manager for pretty much the whole of the last tour, four months. That’s pretty heavy.”
According to Mason, one of the upsides of the local music press following the band’s every move is there are now fewer wild rumours circulating about, like that one about being the product of a clever A&R person.
“Before we had much stuff out, people could either talk about ‘Delete’, or they could talk about how we dress or how we sound like Oasis or how they hate us,” says Mason. “But now there’s a lot more stuff to talk about, so they don’t have to make all that shit up anymore.”
