DZ Deathrays on Bloody Lovely

I was going to start out by saying how huge 2017 was for Brisbane lads DZ Deathrays, but, the truth is, every year since their 2008 inception has been a ‘huge’ year for the band and 2018 is already shaping up to be no different.
Coming off playing the entire Falls Festival, DZ have already supported The Foo Fighters, released their third full-length album, as well as announcing a massive nation wide tour. So how has Shane Parsons, the groups bass player and lead vocalist, been handling it all?
“It’s been awesome;” he responds, “We were stoked about Falls Festival, we have always wanted to do the whole tour of that festival so it was really, really awesome to do that. The Foo Fighters support was again awesome, we didn’t have much time for that one to sink in, they asked us the day before it was announced and of course you say yes to sharing a stadium with The Foo Fighters. It’s all been a cool little runway for the album launch.”
With ‘Bloody Lovely’ in the works for nearly three years, Parsons spoke of how the albums release was a “big relief” for the band.
“It’s one of those things where we started writing it in 2015, started recording bits and pieces of it in 2016 and in 2017 at the start of the year we actually finished recording it and now we’ve just been sitting on this finished project for almost a year,” he explains. “So for us, it’s a big relief to finally get it out there and have people hear it and to start playing the songs live.
“It was a bit of a record where we thought ‘let’s just do a total rock record.’ We didn’t want it to slow down too much; we wanted it to be 100 miles an hour the whole time. Something that you can put on at parties but also listen to it on your way to work or whatever.”
Scoring triple j’s feature album and no. 4 on the Aria Charts, ‘Bloody Lovely’ has already become a serious contender for Australia’s best rock release of 2018, and it seems like everyone has been taking the time to enjoy it, except for the band themselves, who are already hard at work on its follow up.
“We have a bunch of new demos,” Parsons says. “We really don’t want to waste another four years in between albums again so we thought we should get it together a bit. We are writing as a three piece now as well with Lachy who has played guitar with us for three years on stage, but we decided it would be awesome if he jumped in and started writing with us.”
But we will have to wait a little while for the next album considering DZ have a huge touring schedule ahead of them, including the ‘Bloody Lovely’ Australian tour which features an absolutely stacked line-up.
“We really wanted to put together a solid punk rock line-up for this tour and we wanted to get bands from as far around Australia as possible and I feel we got that covered; Boat Show is from Perth, These New South Wales from Sydney and Clowns from Melbourne. I’ve met them all before here and there but I’m sure we will end up all being good buds, it should be great!”
When & Where: Karova Lounge, Ballarat – May 17. Support comes from Clowns, who happened to warm up the masses for Foo Fighters in Melbourne.

Written by Alex Callan