The usage of a dating app may not be the most conventional way to put a band together.
However for The Buoys frontwoman Zoe Catterall, it was one of the more obvious ways to find people with similar interests. "I didn't really have any female-identifying friends who played music, at least who weren't too terrified to do it," Zoe laughs."I met our drummer Tess through a Tinder date, and I just wouldn't shut up about how we really needed a drummer. . . so really I just used dating apps to build the second iteration of The Buoys."
Although it took a couple of tries to find the right fit of bandmates, the current line-up of Catterall on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Tess Wilkin on drums, Courtney Cunningham on bass guitar and backing vocals, and Hilary Geddes on lead guitar and backing vocals has been a winning combination for the past four years.
"Women are exceptional multitaskers, and we just kept meeting people who had so much going on in life; who wanted to do big things, get big jobs, and then eventually it meant that they couldn't be in a band anymore," Catterall explains.
"I think it was really good to meet really like-minded people and then to keep trialling and moving through people until we found people who had the space and time to be in a band. A lot of work, but it was useful to meet all those exceptional women.
"It's so valuable to your soul to meet that many cool people, but I don't know if it necessarily directly tied to the trajectory per se; ad this latest line-up, we've been together for over three years now, so it kind of just feels like we're in and we're doing it now."
Fast forward to 2024, and the band has recently released their latest single, 'Settle Petal', and will release their debut album later this year, with a number of festival appearances upcoming including a date as part of Great Southern Nights in Parramatta.
"We're just saying yes to things that we really want to do – we find it really hard to say no to gigs that we know are going to be really fun because for us, we don't want to do it if we're not intentionally going out and having lots of fun," Catterall says.
"So we'll play a few scattered shows the first half of the year before jumping on a really big headline period in the middle of the year."
Great Southern Nights will be special for The Buoys, Catterall explains, because it will be their first headline show in Sydney in over a year.
"It's been a really long time because we've just been doing so many huge support slots, and then of course we had to buckle down for quite some time to record the album," she says.
"It's been so long since we've been in our own home town where we could hang at the merch desk for however many hours we want and just talk to people."
The Sydney music scene has had an integral influence on The Buoys' sound, although Catterall says they're slowly evolving away from the "classic Sydney DIY" sound they had a few years ago.
"I think maybe three or four years ago it was 99 per cent local influenced – all I ever did apart from working my day job to payroll gigs; I was at gigs four or five days a week," she laughs.
"So it influenced where I wanted to play; it influenced what I wanted to play; it even influenced giving me the confidence to play, because up until I had started watching more women in the local scene onstage, I was too terrified to do it myself."
The band will also use their Great Southern Nights show as an opportunity to trial some of the music from their forthcoming album in front of a live audience.
"When we take the album tour on the road we want it to be a very intimate, fan-focused show; there'll be a lot of talking in-between songs and just hanging out," Zoe says.
"This show at the Albion might be a good chance to do a new song then make people help me choose what songs we end up playing for this set for the upcoming tour."
The Buoys play Albion Hotel in Parramatta 14 March as part of the NSW live music programme Great Southern Nights. The Buoys also play Party In The Paddock in Tassie 8 February as well as the Melbourne leg of Laneway 10 February, followed by Caltowie Chilled Out 'n' Fired Up in rural SA on 23 March.
