'Offending The Right Person': A Swayze & The Ghosts Take Aim On 'Paid Salvation'

Five years on from forming, A Swayze & The Ghosts are finally ready to release their debut album - though technically, it’s not their first.

“So funnily enough, we’d actually recorded a record - a full length - when we first started playing together, back when we were a three-piece. And it was really bad,” laughs frontman Andrew Swayze.

“We were just super high and drunk the entire time, and it turned out to be rubbish. We ended up toughing it out, and then re-evaluating what it meant to be in a band I think, and we took things seriously from then on.”

It was the right call, Paid Salvation is worth the wait. It's an album that moves from disco basslines to straight-up garage rock and never pulls a punch - in a little over 35 minutes, it tackles everything from ecocide to social media addiction to religion. But Swayze isn’t too stressed about where lyrics like “God is dead” might land them.

“I’m excited, like really excited. No apprehension at all,” he says when asked how he’s feeling about the album’s impending release. 

“I mean, I wouldn’t record something unless I thought about it a lot. And this is the thing, this is kind of what took so long to record my vocals is because I’d write a song and then revise it like ten times, you know, just because you do... When you’re talking about sensitive subjects in a subjective manner, you’ve got to be sensitive to people and, you know, I respect the people’s opinion - I don’t just hold my opinion above everybody else’s - and I like to know what I’m talking about if I’m going to talk about it, so all of that is taken into account while writing tracks, like, ‘Ok, this line may come across offensive to the wrong person,’ or like, ‘You know, this might not be what I’m trying to say.’ I never really get nervous about releasing a track because I’ve definitely thought about it a lot.

"I’ve been given this platform to explore and share my thoughts, and just speak up for people who maybe don’t have the same platform and also challenge people..."

“For me, music and lyrics are equally important and I think giving attention to what you’re actually saying within your lyrics is ultra important, not just using throwaway lyrics. I’ve done that before, don’t get me wrong. There are earlier songs where I’ve sort of just used basic filler really, but I’ve been given this platform to explore and share my thoughts, and just speak up for people who maybe don’t have the same platform and also challenge people. I know that people are gonna hear songs that I have written and I know that some people are going to hate what I say, and I don’t care. I don’t mind if I’m offending the right person. It’s not really a problem to me.”

Over the past few years, the band have become known for their frenzied live shows - it’s not unusual to see Swayze dangling over balconies or parting the crowd while belting a tambourine - and it’s an element they wanted to maintain on the album.

“We wanted to work with [producer] Dean Tuza because we’re all really massive fans of These New South Whales’ record, just loved the sounds on it, and just everything about it... And he, since day one, has just been the best guy to work with… He’s just like, ‘Ok, so how do you guys want to do this? I’ll work out how to achieve that.’ You know what I mean? He was the producer, of course, but he was also very hands-off in a way as well. So we still got to do everything how we want it to be done, which is cool. We spent like three days tracking it, we tracked it all in a room together, just isolated all the amps and whatnot.

“We’re a live band and we thought that we’ve got to try and capture that energy and conviction on our record so we did that, and then I did my vocals separately. Pretty much everything was tracked within those few days, but it just took about another six months for me to finish my vocals because we tracked it all in Melbourne, and we all live in Tassie. We all worked full-time at that point, we had to sneak in whenever we could to get my vocals done. I’d just go up for a couple days at a time and then come home and go back the next weekend. It was a slow process, but a quality process, and I think we kind of discovered ourselves as a band, even more so. I think we sort of just reaffirmed who we want to be as a band and how we want to sound recorded.”

Paid Salvation is out this Friday 18 September via Ivy League Records. Head here for more info.