Violent Soho will make one of their few live appearances this year when they play the closing party for Brisbane Festival later this month.
The band released their last album, 'WACO', in 2016 and guitarist James Tidswell says they've largely moved on from the record, with their creative energies devoted to writing new music. “We've just been taking it really cruisy, all working on our own things but with Brisbane Festival coming up we jumped at the chance to play.
“We're only playing a couple of shows this year and this will be the only show until there's new stuff, I imagine. We jumped at the chance of playing Brisbane Festival during Riverfire; you can imagine how much that is right up our alley.”
The closing party for Brisbane Festival puts a neat little bow on the city's premier cultural event and will also feature performances from Meg Mac (click here to read our recent interview with Meg), WAAX and Methyl Ethel. “Obviously we love WAAX, but we're fans of the whole line-up,” James says.
“When we saw [the line-up] we knew we had made the right decision. It was exactly what we wanted to do and we feel really grateful to get to do it.”
With Violent Soho working on new music, James says the closing party show will be a chance to give audiences an indication of what to expect from the band once they release their new material into the world. “We're still working on it but we're going to make sure it's something a little different in terms of how it's presented and how it's played.
“We'll be sticking to the songs people already know, but we'll show an inkling as to what the future will be and the direction we'll be going in.”
After the success of 'WACO', which tied together themes of control and illusion using the 1993 Branch Davidians siege in Waco, Texas as the central source of inspiration, James says the band's biggest concern at the moment is how best to present their new material.
“We really want to make sure that we're representing it in the right way,” he says.
“When we became more popular there were more bands like Flume and Chet Faker at the time, so we stood out exactly how we were whether we liked it or not.
“Whereas now there's so much rock music, we just want to make sure we are being ourselves and really making sure it's clear who we are and where we come from.”
Though fans are surely eager to hear new music from Violent Soho, James makes it clear he and his bandmates are determined to retain the authenticity and quality of content on which they've built the group's reputation.
“I think the idea is that we can't control those things, but it's about protecting the honesty and the reason why we're a band,” he says.
“That's all we're ensuring is happening at the moment and once we've made sure we're fully protected and it's represented honestly, then we're away.”
