Cry Club's Debut Album Is EVERYTHING You've Been Hoping For

From the moment we heard DFTM, we knew that Cry Club were for us.

It seems a lot of other people felt the same too with the Melbourne via Wollongong duo (vocalist Heather Riley and guitarist Jono Tooke) quickly selling out shows and gaining spots on festivals like Splendour In The Grass, Laneway, Falls and more. 

Now, finally, comes the release of their debut album - God I'm Such A Mess - which Tooke describes as "very autobiographical for the two of us".

“God I’m Such a Mess. It honestly says it all. These past few years have been extremely tough for everyone - it’s easy to feel nihilistic or want to give up, and each new hurdle seems so much fucking bigger than the last one," said the pair of the album. 

"This album is really about telling yourself it’s OK to be upset. It’s okay to cry, to be angry, to be anxious, to struggle, because if you’re honest about not being okay, it makes it easier to start walking the path towards being okay again. It’s okay to throw your whole heart and soul into something, even if it fails."

"We’re an open book, and so is this album."

What they're saying...

Riley and Tooke have shared an exclusive piece with The Music, telling us about the five songs that inspired God I'm Such A Mess.

Civil Civic - Run Overdrive
This song feels like a direct injection of serotonin to me, when everything comes crashing in it feels like that changed the direction of my life when I was 17. The combination of elements here with the drum machine, distorted bass, dry snappy guitar and washy synths has always been a huge inspiration for me sonically, which really helped establish Cry Club’s identity when we first started. I think specifically the combination of dry, slightly overdriven guitar and absolutely fuzzed out bass is something that I will always find endless inspiration in. - JT

My Chemical Romance - This Is How I Disappear 
The sheer DRAMA and range of this song… absolutely wild. Gerard Way is probably one of my biggest inspirations as an artist personally, and there’s a lot of MCR theatrics in the way I sing. When we recorded vocals for the album, “Go full Gerard” is a note that came up more than once. The way This Is How I Disappear grinds this melodramatic, almost sobbing delivery up against snarling verses and belted choruses inspires us to push my aural ~drama~ as far as it can go. 

It tells a story through the delivery alone, if you didn’t speak English you could still understand the specific emotions of the song, and that’s super important to us both in the songwriting and recording processes. - HR

M83 - Don't Save Us From The Flames
Again, the washy but large sonic palette is such a huge thing for me. The contrast between the verses and choruses is so huge, I think it taught us a lot about how to maintain a sense of scale and size even when things aren’t hitting the ceiling in volume. That piano in the verse is a great example of something I try to do in a lot of my arrangements as well - I love bass notes moving around otherwise static chords, there’s this melancholy you can drag out of otherwise happy sounding tonalities. Kinda feels like those shots of sped up crowds moving past someone standing still. - JT

Dorian Electra - Flamboyant 
God, the opulence, humour, and campy fun of this song is to die for. Dorian goes all the way unapologetically in everything they do, and this is a beautiful distillation of that. We sometimes worry if we’re too simple and direct but that upfront honesty that Dorian brings to this song is a reminder that it can be so, so effective. 

The heavily affected, Auto-Tuned vocals slip into our album on songs like Lighters, using effects on vocals not as a practical tool but something that informs the emotion of the song. It’s a great example of how anything can be a pop song, no matter how weird or harsh it is, and it’s those boundaries (what pop “should” sound or look like) that we’re interested in smashing to bits. - HR

The 1975 - Love It If We Made It
Before our first session with Gab [Strum aka Japanese Wallpaper], we were scouring the Internet for modern pop bands with guitars in them for references and somehow The 1975 came up - I had never listened to them before and I had no idea what to expect. The second the verse kicked in it felt like I’d found the key to unlock how we could combine our disparate influences - their distorted drums and the vocal treatment has been such a huge thing for us. 

I think a big thing was also seeing a band who combined pop and post punk elements and connected a huge amount to their audience kind of proved to us that what we wanted to achieve was possible? Like, here’s this stadium sized band who have answered the question we were in the midst of figuring out ourselves. Helped that Gab was already a massive fan of them too. - JT

God I'm Such A Mess is out now, check it out below.