How one all-night session defined a debut album

The red recording light stayed on for fourteen hours. By the time the sun came up over the rooftops of Brunswick, the band had scrapped their setlist, raided a nearby op shop for a banjo with three working strings, and accidentally recorded the song that would anchor their entire debut record. It was the kind of session that every musician chases and almost nobody plans for, a night where exhaustion dissolved the polish that had been smothering the songs.

There is a particular kind of magic that only arrives after midnight, when the studio coffee tastes like dishwater and every take starts to feel like a confession. For this Melbourne four-piece, the session that nearly broke them also became the one they could never replicate. The tape from that night is the reason their debut exists at all, and the story of how it came together says a lot about how records are really made in the Australian underground.

A warehouse studio in the heart of Brunswick

The room itself had a history before the band ever plugged in. A converted textile warehouse on a backstreet in Brunswick, the space had hosted everything from noise shows to queer dance parties to a briefly legal squat cinema in the early 2010s. The walls were still patched with old gig flyers, and the high ceilings gave every snare hit a metallic, cathedral-like tail. The band had rented it for a week on a mate-rate deal, paying in cash and cartons of beer.

Brunswick is the kind of suburb that feeds directly into the mythology of Melbourne's music scene, sitting cheek by jowl with Fitzroy and Northcote, all of them spilling bands into the same handful of pubs and live rooms. Walking to the studio meant passing the Trades Hall, passing the 24-hour bakery on Sydney Road, passing the kinds of late-night kebab shops that have sustained every touring band in the country since the 1990s. It felt less like a professional recording environment and more like a community hall where someone had accidentally left the mixing desk on.

Three days in, and nothing was working

By the third day of the session, the band had accumulated about nine hours of usable takes and roughly thirty hours of polite, polished, utterly lifeless performances. The drummer was counting too carefully. The singer was saving her voice for the wrong songs. The bass player had started overthinking every note, and the guitarist kept reaching for the same delay pedal to hide the fact that he didn't know what the song needed yet.

Producer Asha Mistry, who had flown in from Sydney for the week, called a break around 10 p.m. and suggested everyone go for a walk. The band trudged down to the park near the CERES environmental park, sat on a bench, and talked for an hour about nothing in particular. They talked about the long drives between shows on the east coast, about the absurdity of crossing three time zones to play a forty-minute set in Perth, about the bands they had grown up seeing at the Barwon Club. By the time they walked back into the studio, the temperature had shifted. Someone had plugged in a kettle. Someone else had started humming something that wasn't on the setlist.

When midnight dissolved the setlist

The new rule, agreed upon in jest, was that anything they played after midnight didn't count. It was a permission slip to fail. The drummer started playing a slow, almost funky beat that had no business being in an indie rock song. The singer, who had been nursing a head cold for two days, leaned into the microphone and sang the first thing that came into her head. The guitarist picked up a mandolin that had been lying in the corner of the room for no apparent reason and started playing a melody that sounded like it had been pulled out of a country record from 1973.

It is the kind of alchemy that cannot be forced or budgeted. A lot of the best records to come out of the Australian underground have been shaped by exactly this kind of accidental generosity, the willingness to follow a strange idea past the point of embarrassment. A useful primer on that lineage can be found in the secret history of Australian DIY punk in the 1990s, which traces the thread from inner-city house shows to the present moment.

A banjo with three strings and a drone that wouldn't quit

Somewhere around 2 a.m., the bassist came back from a late-night run to the Vinnies op shop on Sydney Road carrying a banjo that had clearly seen better decades. It was missing a string, the tuning pegs were rusted half-shut, and the neck had a visible crack. He plugged it in anyway, mostly as a joke. The joke turned out to be the missing piece of the song. The instrument sat perfectly in the midrange, a brittle, plucky counterpoint to the guitar drone underneath, and it gave the whole track a homespun, almost Appalachian texture that no one in the room had known they were looking for.

It was the sort of happy accident that has fuelled more than one unlikely record in the past few years. The full story of a similarly serendipitous moment is told in how a rusted banjo became an indie hit's secret weapon, which makes the case that some of the most enduring sounds in alternative music have come from instruments that were almost thrown away. The band tracked the banjo part in a single take, with the bassist laughing through half of it, and the room tone is permanently embedded in the mix.

The chant that built the bridge

The breakthrough came around 4 a.m., when the producer suggested something none of the band had considered. She had been reading about early liturgical music and the way drone vocals were used in medieval chant to hold long, hypnotic passages together. She asked the singer to record a single, sustained note while the rest of the band played underneath it, layering the same pitch over and over until it became a wall of sound. The singer, who had been awake for nearly twenty-two hours by that point, agreed without much protest and sang one note for what felt like an eternity.

The result became the bridge of the song, a long, slowly building passage that sounded like it had been lifted from a cathedral. The band, half-joking, started calling the section "the monk bit." The strange thing is how perfectly it fits. The intersection of ancient vocal traditions and modern drone music is a rich, if unexpected, vein, and it is explored in depth in the unlikely influence of medieval chant on modern drone. By the time the band finally wrapped at 6 a.m., the track was twelve minutes long and completely unlike anything else on the record.

Why this night felt different

Every band has stories about sessions that went sideways, but this one felt different for a specific reason. The band had stopped trying to make a record and had started, almost without realising it, to make music. The difference is subtle and enormous, and it is the difference between a debut that sounds like a collection of songs and a debut that sounds like a world. The exhaustion, the borrowed instruments, the accidental drone, the jokes that turned into choruses, all of it added up to something that could not have been planned.

The DIY instinct that runs through Australian independent music is partly to blame, and partly to thank. Bands here are used to making do, to driving six hours to play one show, to recording in loungerooms and warehouses, to figuring out how to get a record pressed when the local pressing plant closes down. That culture of resourcefulness produces a particular kind of art, one that is suspicious of polish and hungry for accident. The night in the Brunswick warehouse was an extreme version of that ethic, pushed past the point of reason and into somewhere genuinely strange.

The track that became the album's opening

When the band finally listened back to the tape, bleary-eyed and running on gas station coffee, they knew immediately which song had to open the album. The twelve-minute track, the one that had started as a joke and ended as a drone, became the first thing listeners would hear. The rest of the record was rebuilt around its mood, its tempo, its particular brand of exhaustion. The debut, which had nearly been abandoned a week earlier, was finished in three more days of sessions and released the following spring to the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that keeps community radio programmers up at night.

The single started getting rotation on PBS in Melbourne and FBi in Sydney within a fortnight. The band was booked to play Bigsound in Brisbane that September, and they ended up closing their showcase with the track, watching the room go from chatty to silent in the space of the first drone.

The full session is now being prepped for release as a deluxe edition, with the twelve-minute track remastered from the original tape and packaged with a forty-page zine of photographs, lyric drafts, and the original op shop receipt for the banjo. Pre-orders open on the Balloon Machine shop this Friday at 9 a.m. AEST, with 200 hand-screened vinyl copies allocated and a worldwide digital download available from midnight the same day.