G’DAY SUNSHINE!

DARWIN is a frontier town. Located so far north it has a monsoon season, it’s the capital of the Northern Territory – an area as vast as Mongolia but with the population of Derby. The place holds a certain fascination for Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, who grew up in a rather different environment, 3000km away.

“It’s a magical place,” says Tom Russo. “It’s like a different country to Melbourne. Everything’s more brilliant. The sea is bright greenish blue, it looks so beautiful, but it’s like a cruel joke because it’s full of all of the poisonous things. So you can’t swim, because there are sharks… and crocodiles. Mostly crocodiles.”

“It’s a mystical place, the Northern Territory,” says Fran Keaney, the band’s biggest enthusiast for the area known as Australia’s Top End. “It has this orange haze and the smell of burning eucalyptus. The spectre of nature looms so large. It felt like the songs were at home in this mystical, hazy, scorched landscape.”

“THE SONGS FELT AT HOME IN THIS MYSTICAL, HAZY ” LANDSCAPE
FRAN KEANEY

Last year, the group played Darwin for the first time and stayed on for a few days. During a day trip, they decided to test new demos for the follow-up to their debut, 2018’s Hope  Downs – blasting them out as they drove down a red dirt highway.

“If the songs aren’t hitting you when you’re driving down the desert highway, then they’re not any good,” says Russo sagely. “But they all had this energy to them. We thought, ‘OK, we’re onto something here.’”

Those songs make up their new LP, Sideways To New Italy, its 10 tracks combining the band’s melodic lyricism and duelling, chiming guitars with some of their finest material to date. These are conventional songs that feel constantly surprising: “Cameo” spirals into blissful melodic detours and “Falling Thunder” blossoms into new euphorias as it nears its end. “The Cool Change”, meanwhile, combines the stoned psychedelia of “Rain”-era Beatles with a spiteful slice of mid-’60s Dylan.

“Yes, we have different singers,” says Keaney, “but we’re all cultivating this vision together. I think we all seem to move in similar circles, creatively, because we talk a lot about the songs – lines from the