Home Is Where The Art Is

On brand new third album Find Something You Love And Let It Kill You, Adelaide rock trio Grenadiers have subtly refined their sound to reflect their love of Australian bands, as well as the overseas outfits they've always boasted proudly as reference points, though, as frontman Jess Coulter points out, this shift was more due to happenstance rather than planning.

"There's not too much of an agenda with anything we do, really - I guess the agenda was to write an album that was better than the last one," the singer reflects. "Stylistically we've obviously moved on a little bit - as any band does, you change your sound a bit as you go on - and we've tried to inject a bit more of an iconically Australian vibe into it, and also just harking back to a lot of older bands. 

"Whereas with [2015 second album] Summer the reference points to that might have been The Hives or The Bronx, for this album it's likely to be Radio Birdman or Midnight Oil or something like that. So there's a bit of a different frame of reference but no real agenda per se."

While for years it seemed that many local bands strived to sound more exotic than their actual roots, in recent times numerous artists have embraced the Australian side of their sound and succeeded both at home and abroad.  

"Until this record, we've never consciously tried to be anything - whether it be, 'Oh, that sounds too Australian,' or, 'That doesn't sound Australian enough' - and even on this record that wasn't really part of it at all, we were just naturally listening to more Australian music as a reference point and thus were less afraid to let that shine a little bit," Coulter continues. "It's cool that people are embracing their natural accent and stuff, but to be fair I think that's been a thing in punk and rock for years with certain bands: Frenzal Rhomb started in 1991 or something and they've got the most ocker accent that's ever been in music, and you can even go back further to The Radiators and so forth. 

"And we don't even sing that overtly in an Aussie accent. My accent's neither here nor there; depending on the word that I'm saying it might sound particularly Australian or not, but it's not something that jumps out at you like it does with Courtney Barnett or The Smith Street Band."

Coulter's lyrics certainly speak directly to the Australian experience, especially on new tracks such as Suburban Life and Drunk And Broke.

"Definitely, that's because I don't really have any other experience so that makes sense," he chuckles. "I've never really been overseas for a great period of time or grown up in another country, so the Australian experience is the one that I've been privy to. Any musician or artist of any type is really just a filter for the cultural products around them - they suck them all in and then spit them out as a new thing. My frame of reference has been a lot of Australian bands and Australian movies and the country itself and the people, so obviously that's going to find its way into the music."

The singer himself has described the new record as containing "rock songs about drinking and death", topics at polar ends of his personal spectrum of life experience.

"When I was writing them there wasn't a conscious common thread at all," Coulter offers, "but when I finished the lyrics and looked back on them I realised that they were pretty dark in a lot of places, and there were a lot of references to those two things: drinking and death. 

"Drinking I have a lot of experience with, but death I've had no experience and there's always a lot of fascination with things you know really well or things you don't know anything about. So I guess that's the natural cause for them both appearing so much."