Endless Heights are back and bolder than ever
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Endless Heights are back and bolder than ever

Five years since the release of their debut album, Endless Heights are ready and due to drop their emotionally charged record Vicious Pleasure.
The five-piece Sydney-bred band are as proud as punch of their new album Vicious Pleasure, an emotive capsule of raw thought and emotion, their most daring approach to music production yet. The boys have been working viciously over the last few years, growing both together and individually to collaborate on Vicious Pleasure, an incredibly different sound to their previous works. Though fans haven’t heard from them in a while, lead singer Joel Martorana believes “this is an album for those bold enough to love, and brave enough to own their flaws.” We chat with guitarist Jem Siow about the album, the band and what life is like on the road.
Hey Jem! Thanks for chatting with Forte. At the moment you’re touring with Hands like Houses. How was your show in Melbourne recently?
It was awesome. It was our first time playing an acoustic show and I’m doing quotation marks with my fingers as I’m saying that because it’s kind of like a step-down set. We’re not actually playing acoustic but we’re playing clean electric guitars and we’ve never really done anything like this before in a live setting so we weren’t really sure what to expect but I think it went off. All the shows are sold out! It’s the sickest feeling going on tour knowing that.
How does Vicious Pleasure differentiate from New Bloom? Do you think the time that segregates the albums reflects how you have all progressed musically?
Vicious Pleasure is the album that we’ve always wanted to put out and it’s taken us 10 years to figure out who we want to be as a band and as people, and I think more than ever, we’ve never felt this confident within ourselves and our identity and what we want to say and achieve through our music. To me, that is a massive step forward from New Bloom to Vicious Pleasure.

Listening to ‘Come A Little Closer’, the debut single from the album, it sounds like a variety of genres are mixed in to produce the overall sound. What influences you all to create something different from your previous works?

With Vicious Pleasure, we didn’t want to pigeonhole ourselves into any genre or any style. In preparing New Bloom, we were all a little naive and that was limiting us from who we were striving to be. We would write something and be like “I can’t write a song like this” or “we can’t sing about this” or “we can’t write a melody like this or structure a song like this because other bands that sound like us wouldn’t do that.” Whereas with this record and ‘Come A Little Closer’, we didn’t have any of those limitations.

I read that Joel believes he has stayed in relationships/situations where he could hold onto “some kind of pleasure, convenience or control”, emotions he explores in the lyrics from this album. Do you resonate with this yourself personally?

100%. The beauty about this record is that it’s obviously deeply personal to Joel. This whole record has come together conceptually just through his own experiences. At the same time, a lot of the meaning that we give into the record and all of our creative work is open to interpretation. It can be received in many different ways. Vicious Pleasure is definitely something that resonates clearly with all of us and I think at the bottom line, what we’re trying to say here is to be bold in your relationships, and be bold in your feelings and your emotions. As much as this record is about relationships with other people, ultimately, it’s really about the relationships that you have with yourself.
Endless Height’s sophomore album Vicious Pleasure will be released on February 16 through Cooking Vinyl.
Recorded with Lachlan Mitchell (The Jezabels, The Vines) the album includes 11 emotive tracks, ‘Run’ being Jem Siow’s favourite. We can’t wait for you to check it out!

Written by Hannah Kenny


Image by Jennifer Poon