Laura are a magnificent post-rock band hailing from Melbourne who’ve been combining elements of harsh drone and energetic, soul piercing riffs since early 2002. Tone Deaf’s Tom Gaffney spoke to Laura’s bassist and co-songwriter Andrew Yardley, discussing their fresh off the press LP Twelve Hundred Times.
Hey Andrew, I’m a massive fan of you and your band’s work. How do you feel the release of your latest album is going?
Thank you very much. We’re really liking how it’s going. We thought that it would be a bit more of a sleeper hit, but people seemed to jump on it as soon as it was released.
Comparing your new releases to your first couple of albums, it looks like you guys have started to stray from purely instrumental sound and experiment with a bunch of different drones and effects. Do you agree?
Yeah, absolutely. We took a different writing style with this one – as one of the members wanted a bit of a break, we found it a bit hard to have group sessions and create music together, so this album had a lot of individual writing for it, and I guess we all individually experimented with effects. That’s also why this song has a few more songs with lyrics compared to our old releases. When we each sat at home composing, we found that we’d just sing along to what we were creating.
Are any of you classically trained in music? I would imagine that would help a lot during songwriting.
My brother Ben and I are definitely self taught, but our cello player Caz has a classical background.
With your latest release, are you finding that people are enjoying the same songs as you would expect?
Not necessarily. One of the songs off the album called “The Slow” was thought by us to take a while to get into, but it seems like people just enjoyed listening to it from the first play.
You guys have released a whole bunch of stuff. One live LP, 3 studio LPs and 2 EPs, yet you’ve still managed to stay in the local Melbourne music scene. Do you feel like you guys deserve more popularity and recognition for what you’ve done?
We like where we’re at. We’ve remained at a point where we’re still really grateful for people to come to our shows and really enjoy our music, but not so much that it gets to our heads. We still feel really appreciative of any support from fans we get.
Last question, more for the bigger fans. What’s your personal favourite song to play live and why?
Ahh, that’s a good question. Probably one of the songs off of our last EP, Yes Maybe No, called “Cardboard Cutout Robot Hero Victim Children”. That song just has all this energy, and is really fun to play. I wouldn’t mind creating a lot more songs of that nature.
– Tom Gaffney
Check out Laura’s upcoming tour dates and Tom’s review of their album Twelve Hundred Times.
