Talking with Thomy Sloane of Melbourne’s raucous dirge-rock trio, the memorably named Batpiss, he’s still waking up. An early afternoon chat ahead of the release of the band’s third album, Rest In Piss, saw the bass player delve into the making of the record as he took me through the process behind embarking on what turned out to be a rather emotionally challenging experience.
Though I can imagine him rubbing his eyes and quietly yawning on the other end of the phone, Sloane’s enthusiasm and candidness when it comes to the making of the album is nevertheless strongly present.
“It’s about pain and missing people who have died.” he says. “The name, Rest in Piss, is not only a play on our name, but it’s an ode to people we’ve lost over the last couple of years to suicide and overdoses, shit like that. It’s a little homage to them and also a homage to saying goodbye to the old style of writing; we’re all about new beginnings now and moving forward, just getting over shit.”
“It feels like we’ve been sitting on it for a while, from when we actually recorded it through it getting pressed and now released. We can’t wait for it to come out. We’ve been getting some good feedback so far, which is nice.”
https://soundcloud.com/poisoncityrecords/batpiss-paralyzed-single/s-0J4Yf
Now three albums in, Sloane admits that the band has shirked any of those first/sophomore album jitters and instead, Batpiss had focused on taking a slight diversion from the creative path they had gone down throughout the course of their previous records.
“I feel like three albums solidifies you as a real band.” he says. “I never thought and I had no idea that we’d ever make three albums and now I’m pretty sure we’ll make another one too, which is cool. It’s all worked out. The idea behind this one was that we wanted to step away from previous stuff we had done. On our first two records, they were pretty aggressive and angry but I think with this one, we wanted to get away from that stuff more. Experiment a bit more, I guess. With the first two records, we recorded them completely live, because we had the idea that we had to be able to play it live. It needed to sound like what we do live. With this one, we were just like, ‘Let’s just make a nice sounding record and then we can deal with playing it live later on’. It made it so much more fun.”
“It’s a documentation of time and you look at other bands’ records that sound completely different to other ones; it’s what we’re all about. I feel like no one really wants to write the same album twice. You’ve got to keep it interesting for yourself; you’re not really thinking of fans while you’re writing, it’s more about creating with the people you create with and keeping them happy!”
With the album now out today, focus has turned to the national Batpiss tour, that sees the band start in Hobart on August 11th, and finish in Wollongong on September 9th.
“I can’t wait to start playing it,” Sloane says. “All of it, we’ve never played live before. We haven’t really jammed because Paul, our guitarist, has been in America for the last two months. He gets back a week before we go on tour, so we’ve got a week to learn it! I guess it’s still new for us; usually when you write an album, you’ve been jamming a song for ages and they seem old by the time the record comes out.”
“This time, it’s all still pretty new, which is cool. I just want to see how people take it; I feel like it’s our best stuff yet. Hopefully people who might be seeing us for the first time, it might be good or it might be bad. They might hate it or they might like it and listen to the other old stuff and go, ‘What the fuck is this?’ That’s totally cool as well; each to their own.”
BATPISS AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES
August 11th | Brisbane Hotel, HOBART
August 12th | Club 54, LAUNCESTON
August 18th | Crowbar, BRISBANE
August 26th | The Tote, MELBOURNE
September 1st | Karova Lounge, BALLARAT
September 2nd | The Loft, WARNAMBOOL
September 9th | Rad Bar, WOLLONGONG
Keep up to date with Batpiss here.
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