Veering between wavering, hearfelt vocals one track, and raucous punk anthems the next, Melbourne’s Slowly Slowly have a varied arsenal under their belts.

Their debut LP Chamomile uses it to full effect, and we’ve asked the duo about exactly what they’ve poured of themselves into each track – one of which we premiered earlier this year, and are big fans of.

Having sold out their last gig at The Workers Club, the boys will this time be playing a celebratory gig at The Evelyn on Friday August 19 – it promises to be a wild one.

Chamomile is available now on iTunes through Catch release Records.

Elbows

This was the first song we wrote that we 100% knew would be on our first full length. It has been recorded for a long time and we always knew it would be the opener. The song was tracked on a crappy little nylon guitar that sits around the studio for noodling on and it all happened in about an hour or so.

Alex was intent on setting the scene with this song and capturing the fragility behind a lot of our yelly, loud, anthemic sound. It’s one of my favourite lyrical pieces from the record and represents a time when I was very torn (cue Natalie Imbruglia).

Hey You

This song is a prick. It’s the anger that comes after sadness- for me it’s the backlash against being constrained. This is one of my favourites to play live being it pumps along and we get to jump around like idiots. Alex is still unsure of my line, ‘I’ll cut myself off, and fuck my own hand’ – but I maintain that that shit is poetry haha.

Deathproof

This song was written in 2 distinct periods of my life. The song for me centres around unconditional love and wanting to live up to the expectations of that. And of course what would a Slowly Slowly song be without some heavy self deprivation and whinging?

This song was the easiest to record and I particularly think Alex nailed the drum sound and that is has so much space. Every time we play this live I feel the whirlwind of things I felt when I penned it and I love tapping into it.

Chamomile

Chamomile for me is a very personal song that I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it to the record for a while. It feels a little exposing. It’s funny that it ended up being the title track and encompassing the whole sentiment we were aiming for, but I guess that says a lot about our band.

This song was played in the studio as it was exactly recorded in demo form, completely no changes after its initial conception. There’s a few lines in there that are a little hard to sing for me, due to the nature of the content, but I hope that it resonates with people who like what we do.

Good Friends

This song celebrates the notion that whens something bad happens it just makes you look at all the good things in your life. Sometimes you need that little pinch to bring you back down to earth and realise what you have. I am very lucky to be surrounded by a very close knit community of mates.

I think the sentiment was better relayed by Paul Dempsey in his tune Fast Friends, so if you wanted a better explanation go listen to some Paul Dempsey. In fact just go do it and turn off our shit band.

PMTWGR

This song started off totally different to how it ended up- 4am at the studio, nothing was working, Alex was playing this really low key half time groove on the drums and I was hunched over a guitar strumming the same chord over and over trying to the search the corner of my brain for an explanation as to why nothing was working.

Then it clicked- the song we were trying to write was supposed to be a sad ballad, not some upbeat anthem- so once we came to that conclusion it just opened up the flood gates and the whole thing came together in 5 minutes.

I went round to Tom Lanyon’s house and we penned some harmonies, wrote some new parts together and then he did all his vocals in one night of beers at the studio. For all the struggle at the start the whole process ended up being really painless. Tom is a dream to work with and we think the same way about writing.

Black Confetti

I wrote the music to this song long before the lyrics and melody came into the picture. I guess, without saying too much, the song centres around guilt. It was the last one to jump on the record and I feel it really completes the picture, for me anyway.

I struggled getting the words together for this one, but then as it always happens to me, after days of telling myself I’ll never write a song again- it all comes out in a few minutes and I have to struggle to keep up with the stream of consciousness. I love the space in this track and cannot wait to play it live (we haven’t played it to anyone yet!).

New York, Paris

This is probably going to be the wankiest thing you have ever heard- but I literally woke up one morning, reached over and grabbed my little gibson acoustic Arlo, and it just vomited out of me like lightening had hit my head. I’m not saying it’s anything special, but just the way it happened was super weird, in a way like it was already fully written before I got to it.

The initial demo of the song had just acoustic and strings, recorded on garageband on that very morning moments after I penned the lyrics. A few of my friends still prefer that version to the final that is on the album. I reckon we should post it up one day just to see what people think.

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