DZ Deathrays are bringing live music back to the Sunshine Coast, headlining the relaunch of Villa Noosa’s live music venue The V Room.
Raised in Bundaberg and now based in Sydney, vocalist and guitarist Shane Parsons is looking forward to getting back to Queensland and giving support to regional centres. “It’s been maybe a year since we played on the Sunshine Coast, so we’re pretty excited to get back there,” Shane says.
“It’s kind of like home turf for us too; we grew in Bundaberg so it’s the closest place to Bundy that has any sort of original music going on. We’re psyched to get up there and do a show; the last time we played there was pretty loose.
“We grew up a little bit north of the Sunshine Coast and there’s nothing to be honest, there’s a few bands that go through a year but there’s no scene. I know there are the satellite areas around capital cities in other parts of Australia, like Ballarat, Wollongong and areas like Bunbury around Perth; they have a scene with bands that go through those towns all the time and it would be nice to see that happening up there.”
Releasing their debut album ‘Bloodstreams’ in 2012, DZ Deathrays have quickly become one of the country’s hottest young acts, storming festival stages both here and abroad as well as supporting Violent Soho on their recent ‘Waco’ album tour. In October they’ll join good mates Dune Rats on their International Disaster Tour through Europe.
Having clawed their way from country town obscurity, Shane and bandmate Simon Ridley know all too well the importance of having a healthy live-music scene that supports and nurtures emerging talent. “As a kid growing up, a lot of the bands coming through were more Christian rock type stuff, like church bands,” he says.
“They would come through and play at your school and you’d be interested because it was a live band, but most of the time I’d have to travel down to the Gold Coast for Big Day Out or Brisbane for Livid and that was my fix for live music for a year, every year. We would just play house parties and that was what we did growing up.”
They released their sophomore record ‘Black Rat’ in 2014 and fans can rest assured another album is in the works, although progress has been slow. In February they premiered new single ‘Blood On My Leather’, which Shane says gives an idea of what DZ Deathrays will serve up on their next offering. “We’ve been putting together songs over the last little bit,” he says.
“We did ‘Blood On My Leather’, that was part of a session we did last year. We went to the studio and were just seeing where we wanted to take the next record. We voted for a bunch of different songs we recorded, and ‘Blood On My Leather’ came out banging and that’s the direction we took for the record.
“We used that as a lynchpin to say ‘that’s the sound’ and work on it from there. Since then we’ve been writing and writing and doing a bit of recording while we were in Canada recently, so there’s another single on the way.”
DZ Deathrays perform at The V Room at Villa Noosa (Sunshine Coast) 23 September and Miami Shark Bar (Gold Coast).
