After a two year wait, Brisbane’s Forever The Optimist have released their first record, ‘Arecibo’.
“Most people have probably heard the three singles that we released last year: ‘Enter, Circus’, ‘Warning Horns’ and ‘Revolutions’, so that's been a taster of what the album sounds like,” says the group’s guitarist/ vocalist Dan Page. “It's 11 tracks and it’s pretty progressive in its formula.” With the album’s release, the four-piece have an Australian tour in the works. “We're going to make the show a bit bigger, we've got a bigger lighting rig. We're going to make it special this time rather than just play shows. We want to make it the best that we've ever made it. It should be cool, I'm really looking forward to it.
“We have a very big sound and we produce it live as well,” Page continues. “I think a live performance has to be bang on. We put a lot into our performance and it's a bit of a live visual spectacle as well. We put time and effort into getting the live show looking and sounding as good as it possibly can be.”
‘Arecibo’ may have been two years in the making, but Page believes it was necessary in order to get the record sounding just right. “We started playing live and then we wanted to recreate our live sound in a studio rather than creating an album and trying to recreate the recorded sound live. It was a good few weeks in the studio sort of nutting it all out, trying to get the songs to sound as good as we could get them.”
Forever The Optimist’s latest video clip — for 'End Of Antics’ — will be released shortly. “We just gave the song to the director [Rcstills] who did the clip for ‘Revolutions’ as well. We trust him entirely with just being this creative genius, which he is. Basically, there are a lot of clever camera effects and blue screen stuff, but it's really clever. There’s going to be a lot of colour. A lot of weird slow-mo stuff and basically we're all thrashing around on our instruments. That's about all I can say about it right now.”
Written by Lexi McKee
'Arecibo' is available now. Forever The Optimist will announce tour dates shortly. The band signed with Underscore Agency today.
