Sydney rock favourites The Buoys are embracing the chaos on their second studio album, Concrete Cowboy, out today via Sony Music Australia.
Following their acclaimed 2024 debut Lustre, which debuted at No. 7 on the ARIA Albums Chart, Concrete Cowboy finds the four-piece navigating burnout, relationships, self-discovery, and the overwhelming pace of modern life.
Across 11 tracks, the band – who featured in our Future of Music list last year – balance their signature guitar-driven sound with moments of vulnerability, introspection, and experimentation. Produced by Chris Collins, the album draws on influences ranging from HAIM and The Beths to Adrianne Lenker and The 1975.
At the heart of Concrete Cowboy is the feeling of having too much going on at once, both internally and in the world around us. Tracks including “Take It Over”, “Bitch” and “Welcome To My Brain” confront everything from burnout and frustration to the strange workings of the human mind, while the likes of “Alone In Vegas” and “Tell Me It Gets Better” offer softer, more reflective moments.
With their national tour underway, a November support slot with Foo Fighters and a European and UK tour lined up for January 2027, The Buoys have plenty ahead of them.
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Below, The Buoys’ Zoe Catterall and Hilary Geddes take Rolling Stone AU/NZ through Concrete Cowboy track by track, unpacking the personal stories, unexpected inspirations and creative decisions behind each song.
“Take It Over”
Zoe: Burnout recovery is no walk in the park. In “Take It Over” I’m contemplating my health, my sanity, and the part I played in my own burnout by engaging with the too-fast way of life that most of us aren’t really built for. It tackles everything I personally had to overcome, and the fear that I would never fully recover. It contains one of my favourite lyrics I’ve written: “I did the things that I was told. I bought the future of the life that I was sold.”
The song flowed so naturally from the get-go. We all got together with Nick Zaharias and it came together so quickly. Most, if not all, of what you hear vocally came intuitively. The ad-lib vocals, for example, are the first take of improvising through the song top to bottom. It’s really fun when you vibe with a song so much that it needs no editing.
Hilary: This song was so much fun to put together. Nick had a bunch of guitars in his studio and I started riffing a line that we ended up putting on the bass to form the bedrock of the song. It’s dark and gritty, but the chorus guitar tone sends out these bolts of fluro. The move from minor to major between the verses and choruses was purposeful and supports the ‘circus’-like meaning of the song.
“Bitch”
Zoe: This song was born out of someone calling me a bitch. Leading up to the session, I was dealing with the classic case of “they’ll call you a bitch because it’s easier than taking accountability for their actions,” and I was trying my best to stay positive. But on my way there I got a comfort-food snack and had a very light car prang while doing so… I ate my hash browns and had a cry in the car park before heading in, lol.
I wrote it with a good friend of mine, Alistair Hayes. We’re both a little screw loose and I love the stuff we come up with when you put us in a room. What resulted was this beautiful, chaotic song about being called a bitch, which is obviously not a fun time. I’m so glad the song is so fun in spite of that.
For me personally, if the word’s not coming lovingly from the mouth of someone I trust, I’m not having it. It’s pretty obvious when it’s being wielded as a weapon and when it’s not. Are you punching down when you use it? That’s usually the indicator.
The music video taps into that same moment: being unfairly labelled just for having an opinion. The word gets thrown at women who dare to take up space, and the more powerful and wise they are, the more it seems to happen. So it felt only right to feature a Sydney music legend, Fran, someone we see as the epitome of feminine power and lived wisdom. Just like the track, it carries all the chaos, humour, and resilience that went into making it.
“Kill You Back”
Zoe: This is another one I wrote with Alistair. I’ve been sooo obsessed with Illuminati Hotties for years. No one can write and produce chaotic sounds and ideas like Sarah Tudzin, what a legend. I came into the session wanting to write about my ghost haunting my murderer. In the song, my ghost rides home in the car with my murderer, watches them tell our friends they didn’t do it, and sits in on the court trial when they’re caught out. The concept was a bit zany, so in that moment we had to ask ourselves: what would Sarah Tudzin do? And “Kill You Back” was born. If it sounds chaotic and weird, that’s because it’s meant to be!
Hilary: The lead guitar was really inspired by indie bands like Bloc Party. I’ve always loved interlocking guitar parts. They create this sense of propulsiveness in the song and make me want to dance. The ‘noise’ solo was the first take we did in the overdubs. The energy was there, so we ended up leaving it in!
“Waiting”
Zoe: We wrote this one with Fletcher Matthews on the same day we wrote “Alone In Vegas.” It’s such a beautiful song. It came together within an hour or so, I think! I’d always wanted to write a sequel to “Holding On,” and this is it.
Hilary: This was another song that started on the guitar. Fletch was into a descending line I was mucking around with and we built the song from there. One of my favourite things about it is its spaciousness. The pre-chorus feels a little Billie Eilish-adjacent, with a Buoys twist.
“Alone In Vegas”
Zoe: I watched a queer film called Desert Hearts (1985), which (spoiler alert) ends without you knowing whether the two leads, Cay and Vivian, get their happily ever after. “Alone In Vegas” is kind of like a sequel. It imagines Cay and Vivian running into each other in Vegas years later, before eloping and moving to New York together. I’ve only been to Vegas once, when I was 12, so I was definitely experiencing the New York-New York roller coaster very differently as a kid, haha. But that phrase is a new vocal stim for sure.
Hilary: Whenever you change the tuning on a guitar, you often get cool results. Your fingers can work in patterns as if you’re playing in standard tuning, but the sounds that come out are different. The chord progression in this song is one example of that. The drop D is so warm and invites you in as a listener, especially in the verses when it’s so sparse.
“Give Or Take”
Zoe: “Give Or Take” is heartbreaking. I always imagine it as being stuck inside a glass enclosure, so close to experiencing life and love for real, but too afraid to let someone in. I wrote it with Konstantin Kersting, and I’d say it has one of my favourite bridges I’ve ever written. So much so that the bridge makes up a huuuge chunk of the song. One of the coolest things to experience as a writer is when a song grows over time. The outro lyrics were added in the studio as a continuation of the same story that birthed it.
Hilary: We hadn’t really jammed this one as a band before recording it. There’s a sense of openness and flow that can happen when you’re in the recording zone, where you end up doing things you don’t expect. That’s how I ended up playing slide guitar on this track. I love the yearning of the slide sound in the chorus.
“Welcome To My Brain”
Zoe: I’ve always been interested in how brains work. I remember holding a human brain in my first anatomy prac at uni thinking, “How does it do all the things?!” and “Omg, it’s so heavy!” Lately I’ve been fascinated by memory.
“Welcome To My Brain” treats my brain like a building, or a storage facility, full of Rolodexes and doors that have been nailed shut, wonky stairs and weird rooms. It tries its best to describe what some of that looks like.
We wrote it at Mojo’s in Walyalup/Freo with Dylan Ollivierre. Mojo’s were very sweet to let us come into the venue early to write. It was pissing down when we landed, so all our gear and luggage got drenched on the tarmac, and we had to unpack everything and splay it in the sun near the window. I think the chaos of the room that day inspired the kookiness of the song. The highlight for me was watching Hilary and Courtney [Cunningham] write the post-chorus instrumental. They somehow created a sound that perfectly sums up what the inner cogs and wiring of my brain sound like in action.
Hilary: This song was so much fun to write. Thinking about streams of consciousness and psychedelics gave us permission to have fun and really throw stuff at the wall. I think that comes through in the licks and hooks responding to Zoe’s lyrics: sometimes kooky and zany, sometimes dark and twisty, sometimes fluorescent levels of joy.
“Pretenders”
Zoe: “Pretenders” reflects on learned relationship dynamics of performing to overcome being pushed away, and waiting for honesty and justice that will never come. At its core, it’s the realisation that it’s okay to outgrow these relationships, to grieve them, and to move on. I started with chords in my room, as I find it’s easier to write when the words are forming quickly.
Once I’d figured out what I was doing vocally, I played around with the chords and landed on a simple riff, which we tweaked in the studio into what it is now. I love that it sounds like skipping. It’s an extremely vulnerable song, so the idea of your heart skipping a beat makes sense to me. For that reason it was really hard to share this one with the rest of The Buoys, because it meant having to be honest about how down I’d been.
Hilary: Zoe showed us this beautiful demo at Tess [Wilkins]’s place one day. I was so into it. I asked if we could change the chorus chords to a different progression to lift it into another gear after the bridge, because the bridge was so delicate in how it built towards a climax. In the studio we stripped it back quite a bit and put the new progression throughout the song, rather than just at the end, to really drive home the big feels of Zo’s lyrics.
“The Cloud”
Zoe: “The Cloud” is an anthem for the calm before the menty-b storm. It’s for when you can sense shit’s about to get rough, but you remind yourself you’ve come out the other end time and time again, and you’ll just have to ride it out and keep going. I wrote it on my bedroom floor after my body decided that’s where it was going to spend the day. It came together so quickly; I obviously just needed to get it out. I initially imagined it going in a rockier direction (think The Beths, “Future Me Hates Me” vibes), but in the studio it took on a new shape.
Hilary: It started to go in a country direction when we were recording demos and I was playing all these licks on the Tele that were really giving early-2000s country bands, aha. We pared it back a tiny bit in the studio. HAIM are one of my favourite bands and I love how they use so many guitar tones to build a story, so we added a lot of acoustic guitars. That’s also how the chorus pedal tone made its way into this song, and the whole album.
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“Stay Up To Date On Politics”
Zoe: “Stay Up To Date On Politics” is very much a stream-of-consciousness song. You’re hearing my word vomit from start to finish on thoughts and themes that cross my mind multiple times a day. Between tours and my day job, I spend quite a bit of time being as horizontal as possible, which means watching a fair bit of TV, and this was inspired by a show I’d been watching. When I sing “oh shit I think I have to watch this episode again,” it’s not because I was in my head. It’s because I’d grabbed my guitar and started figuring out the chords as the episode finished. I wrote the words that same night. It was definitely one of those “stop everything you’re doing until it’s done” songs. I’d originally intended it to be a big rock belter, and I LOVE how delicately it came together in the studio.
Hilary: We stripped this one back quite a bit in the studio. Adrianne Lenker, Joni Mitchell, and Phoebe Bridgers were names that came up when we were discussing how to tell a story in a way that isn’t bombastic. We added in the Am chord, which adds to the interiority of the song, and Court’s bass tone is chef’s kiss.
“Tell Me It Gets Better”
Zoe: “Tell Me It Gets Better” tells the story of a long-term relationship gone stale, and the hope that if you just wait it out, things will get better. But at the end of the day, you’re a frog in a pot, gradually becoming accustomed to how bad things are without realising how much it’s affecting you until it’s too late. I was headed into the city to meet the band and we’d talked about having a country moment on the album, so I flicked through a few guitar parts Hilary had sent us and thought this would be perfect. I wrote all the lyrics and melody in my Uber to the session.
In other words, it came together so damn quickly. I love this one so much. When we were trying to figure out how it ended, I burst with excitement and said we should have our first-ever fade-out song and close the album with it. I’m so, so happy we did. It’s such a beautiful way to end the record.
Hilary: This chord progression was another living-room special. I wrote these parts so the riff could be strummed at the same time as the chords. Big, resonant open chords were the soundtrack of my childhood, and I think you can hear that nostalgia and yearning in the music.
The Buoys’ Concrete Cowboy is out now.
