The infectious pop grooves tinged with Afrobeat rhythms of Jinja Safari have made the Sydney quintet the sweethearts of the indie scene in five, short years since being unearthed by Triple J.
Now, after an 18-month hiatus, they have released the single ‘Find My Way’ from their forthcoming third album. Vocalist, Marcus Azon says the new track is a product of the band’s return to an independent approach to songwriting free of creative interference. “We had not consciously decided to have a bit of a break but I think we were a bit burnt out from touring and working for so long on the first record,” Marcus explains.
“So we were pretty exhausted by that whole process, still very much enjoying it but just not 100 per cent on the direction of the band, the dynamic or the perception of the band and what we really wanted to do.”
After making some drastic changes to their infrastructure, including changing their management, in March 2013 Marcus and keyboardist, Cameron ‘Pepa’ Knight set themselves a challenge of writing one song from start to finish every day. “Pepa and I decided to do a challenge of sorts where we wanted to see if we could start and finish a song each day for about a month and I think we ended up with the bones of about 26 songs after that month.”
Having initially worked with a producer to record the single, Jinja Safari decided to go it alone, preferring instead to trust their musical instincts. “We went back to an earlier version that we had, we worked on that and we relied pretty heavily on the instincts of the other boys in the band as well because that's the process that we worked through.“Either myself or Pepa will come up with the idea, the bulk of the writing of the idea, then we go to the boys and work through if this is a song that we can all associate ourselves with.”
Rather than a resounding comeback record that will rocket Jinja Safari back into the hearts and minds of listeners, Marcus sees the single as a first step to reintroducing fans to their music in preparation for the new album. “It’s definitely a step back into it for us,” he says.
“It’s not like you comeback with this giant single or anything like that. It’s more a reintroducing of ourselves back into the waters of writing, releasing and touring because it’s been about 18 months for us.”
Marcus also produced the video for ‘Find My Way’, which is largely composed of footage he has shot of the band over the five years they’ve been together, creating a fascinating visual retrospective. “That was a bunch of video that I’d filmed on either a GoPro or my iPhone from touring around,” he says.
“I had all this footage and they were kind of parallel to what was going on, there’s some actual footage from the time the song is based around. I put it together and thought I’d send it around to the guys and management and everyone seems to either quite like it or not have a problem with it, so it’s just kind of stuck.”
Jinja Safari are performing a number of small shows to help promote ‘Find My Way’; after 18 months in the shadows, Marcus is both nervous and excited to see how the crowd responds. “We’re doing a few of these smaller shows to suss out where everyone’s at; it’s been a little while,” he says.
“We’re just seeing what our fan base is still like after all this time because we haven’t played in a while and the thing we’ve noticed about the people who listen to our music, it seems they’re quite loyal and they keep turning up to our shows regardless of whether we’ve got a song on the radio at that point in time.”
Jinja Safari Tour Dates
Fri 31 July – Oxford Art Factory (Sydney)Sat 1 August – Woolly Mammoth (Brisbane)
Fri 7 August – Howler (Melbourne)
