In the era of endless, algorithm-feeding album rollouts involving strategically deployed teases, multiple singles, and even tracklist reveals being treated like a life-changing event, it’s refreshing to see an LP drop with zero fanfare or even the slightest hint that it was coming.
On May 26th, beloved Melbourne garage-rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring released their fifth album, In Light of Recent Events, with absolutely no publicity save for a casual announcement on singer Brendan “Brendan Suppression” Huntley’s Instagram account (the band doesn’t do social media).
Guitarist and “self-appointed manager” Mikey Young, aka Eddy Current, says the no-frills approach was by no means an accident, and gives the clear impression that the band are completely allergic to hype and the typical media circus that comes with releasing a new body of work.
“We did think about it to an extent, but maybe not as much as we should have,” says Young from a room in his Melbourne home, where a guitar hangs from a wall above a healthy vinyl collection. “Even back in the day when we were busier, I don’t think we ever enjoyed the press game.
“The intentional build-up to things can add time to the release and usually once we’re finished making a record, we’re just done and we want it out. If you start to tie in press and labels and stuff like that, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna need six months,’ or something.
“And now that we’re bypassing labels altogether, even overseas, we want it out as freshly as possible. So, I think that the lack of fanfare is intentional. We’ve always wanted to let the music speak for itself, and people will gravitate to it if there’s a quality to it.”
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Despite a devoted fanbase and acclaim — both 2010’s Rush to Relax and 2008’s Primary Colours were nominated for Best Rock Album at the ARIA Music Awards, with the latter collecting the Australian Music Prize in 2009 — the disarmingly humble Young says he was surprised that the first vinyl pressing of In Light of Recent Events sold out on Bandcamp almost immediately (a thousand were pressed for Australia; another thousand for overseas).
“Being secretive and trying to have no fanfare is almost more stressful than having fanfare,” laughs Young. “‘Cos you gotta withhold this information. The amount of emails I got on the [release day] Tuesday, I had to pull it off Bandcamp ‘cos it was gonna sell out straight away and shops were freaking that they didn’t have copies.
“If we perhaps just did a pre-order like normal people, you’d be able to gauge like, ‘OK, we need this amount of copies for Bandcamp, we need this amount of copies for shops’. ‘Cos we totally underestimated it and it all sold out in a day. That’s just us being naive, I think.
“It’s a harder time to gauge now compared to 15 to 20 years ago, when we could sell 10,000 CDs or something, because that market is just not there anymore. Records are expensive to make, so it’s really hard to know whether you should press 1000 or 3000, for instance, especially if you haven’t released a record for seven years [last album All in Good Time arrived in 2019]. Sure, everyone likes our old records, but I don’t know if anyone cares about our new thing.
“But in retrospect, I probably could have pressed at least double what I did. They’re not exactly sold out – we just made sure that the shops were satisfied as much as we could satisfy them, and we held back a couple hundred for some upcoming shows. But yeah, it’s nice to be wanted, for sure, and we’ll repress another 1500 for Australia, and 500-1000 for overseas.”
The lean and mean In Light of Recent Events, an album that thoroughly upholds Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s legacy as Australia’s greatest garage-rock band, is also available on several streaming services, but one where it won’t be found is Spotify. Young says they plan to remove all the band’s albums from Spotify in the future and stream them for free on Bandcamp, but there’s still some overseas labels to deal with before it can happen.
“We talked about [avoiding Spotify] when we did our seven-inch last year [Shapes and Forms], and we all agreed on that,” says Young. “I made sure [In Light of Recent Events] has unlimited streaming on Bandcamp, so it doesn’t ever run out there. Not doing the Spotify thing was one small move we could make at the moment. I don’t think that they’re the most ethical chaps going around.
“I don’t think the pay issue worries me as much – I’m not worried about getting my one cent a song or whatever – but behind the scenes the way they’re using their money doesn’t seem like the coolest thing to do these days.” [Spotify CEO and co-founder, Daniel Ek, has personally invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a military AI and defence startup that develops autonomous drones.]
Although he’s been “flat out” with his 9-to-5 job mixing and mastering music for other artists, Young says he and the rest of the band — singer Huntley, sibling drummer Danny “Danny Current” Young and bassist Brad “Rob Solid” Barry — have found time for weekly jam sessions amid their busy schedules.
“Most weeks we try and hold that together,” says Young. “Every Wednesday we just catch up, chat about what’s going on and then we jam for a couple of hours. I feel like they’re a lot shorter jams than we used to do back in the day, but ‘cos we have our own space now and everything’s always set up, we’re a lot more productive.
“I’ve never had the luxury of having our own space where you just walk in and click on a light switch and there’s your amps rather than lugging them down to the rehearsal room. It’s been such a godsend, and I feel like without the space we wouldn’t even have this record.”
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Young says that for the past year, the band have been playing and recording new material, acting as their own audience in lieu of being able to road test and hone the songs in front of a crowd.
“I think we were able to trim any excess fat off things that didn’t really work or didn’t need to exist in the songs and get them down to their necessary elements,” says Young. “Every other album we’ve done we jammed over time until we were like, ‘I think we’ve got enough songs’. And then we booked either a day or half a day – or two days, at our most gluttonous – and we just recorded them all straight away, and that was the album.
“This one was different because of the permanent rehearsal space in my studio where there’s always eight mics set up. Basically, we record our jams and I just leave the computer running for two hours, and if we ever do something that’s a good take of a song, we just put a dot next to it on the whiteboard and go, ‘That’s to remember that that version was good.’
“Close to the end of last year, we realised we had 15 songs to choose from, and we just went back through the dots and figured out which versions, and then I mixed them in January. We’re pretty in-house.”
Young emphasises that the band likes to move fast and loose, which goes a long way to explain the sudden release of In Light of Recent Events. They’re also clearly not ones to pat themselves on the back or rest on any laurels, meaning new tunes are also likely sooner rather than in another seven years’ time.
“Even though we put this out straight away, my brain’s already onto the next thing,” reveals Young. “I’m still happy to play these songs live, but once it’s out there, I’m never going to listen to it again. The recordings are other people’s now. The funnest part about being in a band is making things and the initial part where you come up with tunes.
“Because this album took a while to make compared to others, we’ve been making these really quick, garage-y, even stupider songs, where we basically write them in one night and we’ll record them the next week as an antidote to stressing about getting a song right. I mean, it might not sound like a band like us even stresses about that — the songs are still pretty raw – but [we want] to take that even further and not be precious at all and just write and record. So, we’ve been taking that approach lately and we’ll see where that goes.”
I ask if Eddy Current Suppression Ring might go the way of prolific US indie rockers Guided by Voices, who regularly release three or four albums a year. “Yeah, we’ll go from one album every eight years to like eight albums a year,” Young jokes.
Before any more albums materialise, the band are back on the road playing the new songs after a series of secret shows in 2025 and a triumphant free gig at Melbourne’s Federation Square on September 26th, which drew an estimated crowd of 10,000 punters.
“We played to about 600 people at [Melbourne music venue] The Night Cat and I could tell the love in the room wasn’t just for the old songs — we played a lot of new songs and people were willing to go there,” says Young. “By the time it got to Fed Square [and we played there], I couldn’t sleep for days afterwards. It was weird to experience that amount of people being there for us.”
Sydney’s up next for a free show, with the band playing at Tumbalong Park on Friday, June 12th as part of VIVID Sydney’s Tumbalong Nights program. It’ll be Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s first Sydney gig in over 15 years after shows set for early 2020 were scrapped due to COVID.
“That’s the ideal thing for us — having a free show anyone can come to, that all ages can come to,” says Young. “It’s really hard to put on all-ages shows in venues these days, so a show that’s open for everyone is the most ideal thing. I feel lucky to be asked, and we would like to do more of those kinds of shows — they’re pretty perfect for us. I don’t think the free outdoor show is going to cancel out the other Sydney show at Factory Theatre [on July 3], ‘cos they’re very different experiences.”
Rather than become a studied career band hellbent on chasing hits in a gruelling album-tour-album cycle and diligently playing by the industry’s rules, Eddy Current Suppression Ring have managed to dodge the bullshit and keep it DIY in the truest sense of the term. As Young makes clear, the band have also never forgotten that it’s only ever been about four mates in a room making a racket for fun, rather than desperately pursuing fortune and glory.
“Danny is my brother, and he’s the first person I ever made music with,” says Young. “Brad was Danny’s friend from back in the day, and he’s the second person I ever made music with. Brendan came along a bit later. The four of us clicked, which is not that common or easy to find in a band. I realise how special this band is for us — and for some people — and how lucky we are to have that kind of [great] response, ‘cos I know not every band gets that.
“I’ve been in bands with three other people and not Brendan, and they just didn’t really go anywhere. Sometimes it’s just the right four elements [coming together] that feels like something really unique. I know we all felt that the first time we jammed, so to be able to have that and to have other people respond to that – and to still respond to it 20 years later – it’s pretty overwhelming to think about.
“I’m quite proud of how DIY we are. I don’t want it to turn into a job. Anytime I look too far into the future, my brain starts to trip out, so it’s just one thing at a time. There’s definitely no master plan behind it all — it’s just when it works and when it feels inspiring to do.”
In light of recent events, it’s safe to say that the inspiration is running high enough in the Eddy Current camp that one day soon, these four mates will once again have enough dots on the whiteboard and decide to drop another set of stellar garage-rock songs out of nowhere, forward-planning and fanfare be damned.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring will be playing as part of VIVID Sydney’s Tumbalong Nights program on Friday June 12th, as well as Sydney’s Factory Theatre on July 3th and Brisbane’s Princess Theatre on July 25th.
