INTERVIEW: The Buoys launch debut album 'Lustre': "It really captures more of what we're like as a live band, because there's energy there."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 12 July 2024

Alt-rock Australian band The Buoys, comprising of Zoe Catterall (rhythm guitar and lead vocals), Hilary Geddes (lead guitar), Tess Wilkin (drums) and Courtney Cunningham (bass guitar), formed in 2016 and scored a major breakthrough in 2021 with the release of their EP Unsolicited Advice for Your DIY Disaster. The single ‘Lie To Me Again’ racked up over 3 million Spotify streams and landed on Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2021 at number 85.

After three EPs and multiple singles, today they release their debut album Lustre. Produced by Chris Collins (Woodes, Charlie Collins, Matt Corby), it features 14 tracks and is an earthy, invigorating collection of songs that brilliantly blurs the line between simple, uncluttered classic alt-indie production and a soundscape that is deep and layered. Lyrically exploring emotions and life experiences, it is swings between introspective moments and confident, fuck you anthems.

Sonically the album remains true to The Buoys alt-rock roots, but there are is a variety of sounds, from punk to indiepop to harder rock, that keeps you intrigued to the end.

Latest single ‘Ahead Of Myself’ opens with a muffled beat and develops into a stripped back guitar verse before exploding into a harder chorus. There is a beautiful contrast between Catterall’s gentle vocal in the verses with the multi-layered voices and heavy guitars in the chorus. It perfectly fits the lyrics which explores the conflict between joy and fear when you enter a new relationship and start worrying about if it is one sided and ‘getting ahead of myself’.

It leads into perhaps ‘Ahead Of Myself’s natural partner ‘I Think I’m Love With You’, with a heavier sound that tells of trying to avoid giving into feelings you have for another person: “I always said I would play it cool / But I think I’m in love with you…I can’t think of nobody else.”

Single ‘Holding On’ brings a gentler, more subdued sound to the album which again explores love, and the desperate and sometimes futile hope that this time will be different. “It can be hard to know what to do when you feel someone slipping away, when in the past, this usually meant they were walking out for good,” the band said on the soing’s release. “This song is about hoping that this time, it’s different.”

‘BDSM’ has a frenetic beat, and brings in more punk vibes with dashes of early 1980s new wave with the occasional flash of distorted synths, while ‘Unstuck’ has verses with gorgeous melodies and a slightly off kilter beat before transforming into a buzzy chorus. The album ends with the indie-rock of ‘Totally Completely Fine’ with lyrics that belie the title and the realisation that life is does not turn out the way you dreamed as a child. “I’m still coming around to the promise that it all works out” they sing.

Lustre is a complete buzz of an album that gives you all the beats, melodies and rock out moments you need, whilst also giving you depth and real connective soul-searching in the lyrics that make this more than just a collection of songs, but a experience to immerse yourself in. An impressive debut album to be savoured. We recently caught up with The Buoys to chat all about Lustre’s creation.

Hi everyone! I have to say, Lustre - hooray! It is just so cool and so beautiful as well. What a beast! How are you all feeling about it?
Tess: I mean, I'm just really glad that you said ‘hooray’ to celebrate it! Because you kind of forget. We recorded it in September last year, and you kind of forget by this point that we should be celebrating it, because you get so busy. But it feels really good, and I'm so excited for people to listen to it. It's the thing in my life that I've made that I am most proud of. And I've done some things!

Zoe: I back that. I think it's carried across the whole band, we're all just ridiculously proud of it.

That’s really lovely to hear. And I completely understand what you mean there's so much else going on, because you guys are very much a live band, and that comes with some chaos, as well as joy. You will get to play Lustre live soon, talk to me a little bit about the show that's coming up?
We've been talking about how we can make it nice and special. We've got so many new songs on the album, so we're going to be playing as many of the new ones as possible, But we are going to also change up the set list, get some guest vocalists for one of the songs that we're going to play for every show, because we love it so much, and just try and make it feel as intimate as possible. We haven't done our own headline shows in forever, so we want it to feel like a sleepover, like a big party.

You guys famously do create such a welcoming environment at your shows, and I know that you've each paid particular attention to calling out poor behaviour in the crowd.
Courtney: It’s probably me! I feel very strongly about that There's been a few instances where people get gee-ed up and excited about it and all that sort of thing - and that’s fine - but a lot of our audience is female identifying, and a lot of them are at the front and we just want everyone to feel safe. So I will be more than happy to call out bad behaviour if I see it. I just have no issue doing that because we want everyone to be comfortable.

Hillary: I think we've all been punters at gigs where maybe the vibe has shifted, or it's felt like ‘I really love this music, but maybe this space isn't for me’. So when we're the artists putting on our own show, where we have more control in that space, it's really important for us to try to make it as welcoming as possible.

Tess: The other thing is, there was this amazing documentary on the Big Day Out, I think it was a podcast series, and they talk about that there was a person that died in a mosh during I'm pretty sure it was a Limp Bizkit show. For me, it really highlighted that on stage, you actually have so much power. It made me realise that you can make a difference by what you say on stage. And you can see it, you can see if the energy is changing and it's getting a bit dangerous.

I mean Azealia Banks spoke about the very masculine, aggressive energy in Australia and how she refuses to play here anymore.. What I love about your music, and Lustre is it's so lovely to hear songs that have similar themes and sounds to what I grew up listening to. And it's so lovely to hear them, not just sung by women, but to hear them sung by women with Australian accents. We just didn't hear it, there just was no space, women weren't given the platform. Music in Australia has very much been controlled, and gate keeper by straight white men for a very long time, I was wondering what your thoughts are on this?
Hillary: It speaks to the origin of The Buoys, and why they started.

Zoe:  100%. I couldn't join a band. No one would have me. And it really felt completely based on my sex. The nail in the coffin was a band that I tried to join. They were close friends of mine from the town I grew up in in Cronulla, and they needed a keyboard player. I'd already tried to join a few bands, and I always got the ‘oh maybe, I don’t know’, and then when my friends needed a keys player, I was like, ‘This is my moment. I'm really good at keys, way better at keys than guitar, they can't say no, like, this Is it.’ And then the same thing, they gave the spot to my boyfriend at the time, who had never played keys. He'd never even touched a piano. And then I was like, ‘fuck this boys club’. And I started my own boys club, and very passive aggressively, called it The Buoys!

I have definitely always felt like I had to dress more masculine on stage to feel safe in the space. Felt like I had to speak with a stronger Australian accent than I have. There was so many things that I feel like I did to be more ‘Cronulla’ so that getting up there wasn't so scary and terrifying. As a punter as well, if I ever saw other women on stage, which never really happened in Cronulla, just hearing what people say in the crowd, and then just thinking, ‘fuck, do they say that about me when I'm up there?’ Like, it’s bad. It wasn't fun or safe for women at all. I hope it's different now, but I don't know.

You know, I'm a lot older, and I feel that things are getting better, but you guys are younger than me, and it's still the case where you go ‘we've come so far, but…’
Tess: It's interesting, because there's two different things. There's the industry, and there's the crowds. My experience is that if we play at a festival and there's all sorts of bands playing, the people that come up to us and say, ‘wow, we loved your set, we love your band’, they're not saying ‘you guys are a great girl band’, they're just genuinely frothing. So that always feels good to me, but from the industry side of things, clearly, women in music are still not getting the same opportunities that men are, and you see it in so many different ways, in terms of who's getting played, and lineups. There's usually only one all female lineup in a festival and it’s like ‘job done!’

Hillary: Or there can't be genre crossover. We might play a festival that has maybe close to gender parity, but we might be the only rock band on that lineup. But there might be like five bands also playing alternative rock music that are all men.

Tess: The thing that I think is the worst about that is that it means that we are made to compete against other all female bands in that way. \We don't feel that competition as individuals, we're not looking at other all female bands and going like, ‘I hope we get more listens than them’, or, ‘I hope we get a higher spot on a lineup’. But because there's only room for one all female band on a lineup, they're creating that competition. It also means that we don't get to hang out with them and have our own community.

Hillary: There are bands that are changing that though. I think of Body Type, who speak for us all and we really look up to them as a band,. They played a gig in Sydney recently and they brought all these other bands on to sing as a choir, like Sweetie and Mega Fauna, and I just think that's a really special way to show community when they're giving them, like, a really cool opportunity of playing at a really exclusive venue like Phoenix Central Park.

Let's talk about ‘Ahead Of Myself’, that little surf rock intro that then lasts through the whole song, and then the 60s beat, and your vocals, it's such a beautiful song. Talk to me about this track.
Zoe: I found it really hard to be connected to love songs that I've written. It's such a love song and I listen back to it, and I still get giddy listening to it. It's very high school crush energy. It's nice to feel that, so I need to not get weird about it! I wrote it after a second date, and I was thinking, how do I explain what feeling I was trying to capture? I've been really obsessed with Chappell Roan lately, and she's got this line, ‘Dumb love / I love being stupid / Dream of us in a year’ and that's what this song is. I just came back from a second date, and I was like, what would our relationship look like in a year's time? We're definitely gonna be together. This song is about envisioning that, they feel the same that I do, and we're just like little giddy kids dancing in our room.

Courtney: It was epic to record as well. I feel like piece by piece we put that whole thing together, and then as soon as the vocals were on, it was just like, yeah!

It's a song that you can hear all four of you and that’s not always easy to do when you're in a band, which I think is really beautiful.
Hillary: When we were recording the album, we got to do it over two weeks, consecutive days, which is such a special experience, almost like permission given to explore different sounds that maybe we hadn't done before as a band. Like the Skippy drum beat is not something we'd necessarily done in the same way, certainly not in our previous EPs. And then also finding more ambient guitar sounds. It was like we've got the space to allow ourselves to have a longer intro, or to allow that song to really build a journey around that feeling Zoe was talking about initially.

You’ve all got very eclectic musical background and tastes, and I feel like that has helped you with your creative process because you can go, why don't we try a bit of this, or, why don't we try a bit of that, which I imagine also comes from the confidence and strength in having been together for so long.
Tess: Yeah, it was really beautiful recording this album with Chris Collins. So we recorded it up near Federal, which is not too far from Byron Bay, and Chris just had this really beautiful hands off approach with us, I just felt like he had so much confidence in us, and he let us figure it out. We recorded the whole thing live, and the fact that so we didn't have pre production or anything like that and that changed the feel of a lot of it, because we hadn't really played a lot of the songs together as a band. We maybe built demos on a laptop, but playing them together live, we weren't overthinking it. It was just ‘what feels good? Let's play how it feels’. It really captures more of what we're like as a live band, because there's energy there.

Courtney: It’s definitely a layered album. Personally, I think people are gonna be pretty stunned by what's on there, because it's super eclectic.

Lustre is out now via Arcadia/Sony Music Australia. You can buy and stream here.
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