Interview by Kris Peters
Melbourne punk upstarts Clowns have epitomised the fun and frivolous side of Australian music since their inception in 2009.
Their attitude towards music, coupled with almost legendary live performances, has seen Clowns rise quickly to prominence and notoriety, with their honest and raw appraisal of life through music connecting on a global scale.
After receiving an ARIA nomination for their previous album Nature/Nurture in 2019, Clowns have just unleashed their latest slab of goodness in the form of Endless, a middle finger salute to the pandemic during which it was conceived and a snub to the face of those who thought that period of time would spell the death knell for a plethora of bands and musicians.
HEAVY sat down with vocalist Stevie Williams and drummer Jake Laderman to talk through what to expect.
"It feels like I'm about to…," Williams measured, "… I don't have any kids, but this is what I imagine preparing for a child would feel like (laughs). Years and years of creative energy and the world going upside down from when we started writing it to when we finished recording and releasing it, but now it's here. It's satisfying and maybe a little bit emotional. I can't wait for it to be out in the world and not be our record anymore. It's gonna be whoever listens to its record."
Endless is the fifth album release from Clowns, so we ask the question of whether the process gets any easier the more albums you put out.
"It definitely gets harder," Williams answered without thought. "I feel like when we started the band we were so inspired to get our music career off the ground and there was so much… I guess you would call it creative, low-hanging fruit when we were starting a punk band. We wanted to write a song that had screaming in it, we wanted a song that sounded like The Ramones, we wanted a song that sounded like the Offspring and then once we did an EP and four seven inches and now five albums, now we're reaching super high up to the top of the tree to get that sweet fruit, and we're doing Spaghetti Western eight-minute jams at the end of our record. We're fucking around with thrash metal and dual guitar solos, all in an effort to keep it interesting for ourselves and the people who listen as well. In that essence, it gets harder. It gets way harder (laughs)."
In the full interview, the boys talk more about what to expect from Endless, how the singles released represent the album as a whole, the opening piano intro and why it was used, the central theme of immortality, the closing track A Widow's Song and the inspiration behind it, how Endless differs musically to Nature/Nature, upcoming shows and more.
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