It’s a great day to be a fan of Melbourne indie duo Good Morning – they’ve released their new album as they gear up to play gigs in Melbourne and at the Meredith Festival.
The duo – Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons – have produced a nine-track collection called The Accident, which they only announced last week as they dropped its eight-minute lead single “Soft Rock Band”.
It’s their eighth studio album and second to be released this year, and was written and recorded collaboratively by Parsons and Blair, a departure from their usual process. The album evolved in the background as they were preparing and releasing their previous album Good Morning Seven which came out in March.
It was created in stages: instrumentals were recorded in Greece during a scorching August, lyrics and mixing took place in Joshua Tree in November, and final touches were added at Melbourne’s York Street Recorders in February.
According to the band’s press release, The Accident contains a distillation of sounds and influence as wide as Pavement, The Beatles, Wilco, with a range of big band rock moments and intimate ones, and a product of “indulging imagination”. “Somehow, we broke through the barrier of being vulnerable about our creativity (again) and got into the swing of writing together in a room for the first time in a long time,” the band said.
Good Morning featured earlier this year in Rolling Stone AU/NZ’s Future of Music series, spotlighting 25 of the most exciting and innovative artists from Australia and New Zealand. The feature praised the Melbourne duo as having a “strong claim to be the most underrated Australian band of their generation.”
The band will mark the release of the album with gigs in Melbourne at The Corner on December 4th, The Forum on December 5th, before heading bush to be part of the Meredith Music Festival from December 6th-8th.
The Accident is out now through Good Morning Music Company Worldwide.