Middle Kids’ debut album is a soaring rock record for the ages – so we had a chat about it

Middle Kids’ debut album ‘Lost Friends‘ came out last week and it’s a exceptional record. One that’ll transport you to new places via superb rock anthems and relatable songwriting. A couple of months before its release, we caught up with the band to chat about it, being a band in Sydney and making an album in 2018.

The album’s called Lost Friends – friendship is a big theme on the album, right?

Hannah: It’s like a really strong theme of the album, like friendships and relationships, and kind of showing the different new relationships old relationships. We also feel like it’s partly mourning the loss of the art of friendship, I think it feels like that there’s like a growing thing in the West of people feeling isolated and not connected so much to communities as it used to, so a lot of the album is really about that.

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Tim: Yeah I don’t think we feel like it’s about this regret or ‘oh, we’ve got all these lost friends’, I think we feel connected with our community and our friends but we feel like it’s a struggle being actively involved to remain so, actually people find it really hard to stay together, so that’s more the energy of it.

Has it been a good time working on this record?

Hannah: Well it’s like a mixed bag you know. We made that first EP, which came out February of last year, and then everything on the record was basically after the EP. So the energy we got from that then just pushed us into the album, so it was a great experience I’d say making the album. It was angsty at times but it just kind of was flowing.

What’s the creative community like in Sydney?

Tim: It’s really cool. Especially lately, it feels like there’s a lot of cool artists releasing music, and it’s really fun playing shows and meeting bands and meeting other bands on the road. I feel like there are some original artists coming out of Sydney at the moment. It’s an exciting place to live. There’s certainly a strong DIY punk rock scene coming out of Sydney, there’s Royal Headache, and there’s a whole community around it, and a band called Eddy Current Suppression Ring a few years back, and I actually think that really informed us coming up, because I’d say out of all the musical communities in Sydney, that’s probably the strongest.

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Hannah: I think it created something cool, because for so long people in Sydney would be like ‘ah, Sydney sucks, we don’t have any cool venues’, and that made it felt like there weren’t any spaces for young artists. Sometimes I think out of that space, cool art can be born because it’s like there’s a little bit of block, but it can be really helpful for art, because you have to oppose something and you have to rise up and create something to push through it. I think that’s happened in the last coupe of years. It’s a weird city, Australia is small, and it’s isolated, but I think really cool stuff is coming out of it.

How useful is it supporting big bands on tour?

Hannah: I think in the bands we’ve supported, we’ve had similar ethos about things or something. They’re really just about music, so that’s been so easy for us to connect on. We also got to support a big Australian icon called Paul Kelly. He’s not over here so much, but he’s a huge influence in Australian music. That’s really special.

Middle Kids’ ‘Lost Friends’ is out now

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