We know your speakers are still buzzing from blasting their brilliant third album Yumeno Garden all weekend, but Brisbane indie rockers, Last Dinosaurs, are set to get you pumped up once again with their upcoming headliner slot at Loch Hart Music Festival before taking the record on the road in early 2019 for a national Australian tour. We sit down with Sean Caskey to chat about their release Yumeno Garden and their inspirations.
Hey Sean! First up, how did Last Dinosaurs come to be? Were you brought up playing music?
Not really actually! Lach learnt guitar, but we all went to the same high school which was pretty lucky. We started listening to the same music and showing each other different stuff but it actually all started from The Strokes; seeing ’12:51′ on Video Hits and thinking, ‘holy shit I need to play guitar’. I learnt guitar just from playing their songs and figuring out what they did so my style, in terms of chords, is kind of Strokesy. It was after high school when we came together. We just wanted to go out to clubs and get free drinks and the logical step was to make a band so we did that and were just being idiots for a while then the label Dew Process picked us up and we thought we better start rehearsing!
Yumeno Garden was written in both an isolated ghost town in Japan and also California… How did you find the difference between the two starkly different locations?
Lach was very inspired by the scenes in America. He’s very involved in the soundcloud world and there’s so many communities on Soundcloud and in America especially so he met a lot of people online that he started hanging out with over there. In Japan, it didn’t so much offer any stylistic inspiration; it was more that isolation which really allowed us to just focus on what we sound like. That stems from wanting our songs to sound like our demos. We produced this one ourselves because in the past we’ve had people say those sounds are a bit better than the final product, because they had more soul and character. So in Arita [in Japan], there was nothing to inspire us – it was just freedom and isolation.
If they are yet to hear it, what can listeners expect from the album?
It’s not like a rollercoaster of sound and emotion but if you were to deeply analyse it, it goes pretty far in a lot of directions. Sonically, it goes from really warm to really, really cold. A few songs are purely synth and there are a few songs that are just guitar. One of the main things is that half of the album has been written by Lach, and he’s singing on those songs. None of our fans have ever heard his voice before so it’s like a debut for him… So for the die hard fans, it should be pretty interesting.
Your sounds are a great blend of indie rock, pop and dance electro – who are some of your biggest influences?
After we finished and in the last days of mixing, I stumbled across this band called The Garden, who are these American twins from Orange County. They are insanely inspiring for us. They started out as proper punk and now they just make the weirdest music – really synthy and funky… their whole ethos is DIY aswell and no one is producing their songs except them. it’s cool – I’m attracted to the idea of keeping it all in house. Other than that, we listen to lots of different music but it’s hard to say because there’s too many!
When & Where: Loch Hart Music Festival, Princetown – November 16, 17 & 18 and Howler, Melbourne – March 29.
Written by Aine Keogh