The VANNS are a quartet of chillers out of Wollongong that has slowly but surely been picking up pace over the last few years, and with their debut album in the works, it feels like they are poised for big things to be happening by the end of the year.
The lead single ‘Mother’ just premiered on triple j’s Good Nights, a tune that touches on styles of contemporaries like Catfish and the Bottlemen and Gang of Youths, but with a distinctive sound which dances between lighter indie sounds and heavier rock noise. (Check it out below).
“The track came to be… it was written with Oscar Dawson from HOLY HOLY. Jim and Oscar kind of had the idea for the song and the riff in the chorus and stuff and then we just built it around that. We worked at Headgap which is a studio down in Melbourne,” says band member Cameron Little of the song’s conception.
Little also says the rest of the album may be a step up in heaviness compared to The VANNS earlier work. “I’d definitely say the album’s rockier than previous VANNS stuff. We always kind of get referred to as like surf rock or something, it’s more like just straight up the guts rock…
“There are lots of fuzz guitars. Oscar Dawson, he loves fuzz, he has like this pedal that’s his favourite, he wanted it on everything, so we put it on everything and it sounds good.”
The group developed their rockin’ chops playing in Wollongong, which Little says is a place with “heaps of good bands, and they just keep popping up, it’s awesome,” but laments on the recent loss of one of the city’s most iconic venues, Rad Bar. “It’s a really cool place to play… such a unique venue… They had gigs every night, and three bands on every night. It was nuts.”
Since comin’ up in what I would call the Geelong of NSW (I reckon because of the places size and proximity to the state’s major city, it’s a thing we could be like interstate sister-cities or something) the group have gone on to support the likes of Catfish and Ocean Alley, and even sold out their recent east coast tour, which Little said was a highlight of their live career so far.
“It was only two months, but it was the first tour where we were actually away in a van for like 30 something days, and there was just four of us. Jim and I drove up to Cairns, met the other boys up there and we came down the whole coast. It was very testing, living with three other dudes in a van for a month, but it’s fun. That was definitely a memory.”
The boys have just played a ripper gig down this end of the country at the Grace Darling, but promise they’ll be back again later in the year after the album comes out. Little tells me with a pretty tongue-in-cheek tone of the groups battle plan moving forward:
“We’re gonna do these couple of shows and then rehearse a lot I guess! Another song will come out then the album will come out, just tour that… forever I guess, and then make another one and tour that and make another one and, nah that’s pretty much it.”
Whether that is pretty much it or not, we look forward to it, fellas.
Written by Liam McNally