Midway through last year, Lowtide emerged from the Melbourne underground with their fully formed, deftly constructed self-titled debut LP. For many fans of shoegazey dream-pop, the band was a fresh discovery.

However, two releases preceded the album – 2010’s You Are My Good Light EP and 2011’s double A-side ‘Underneath Tonight’/‘Memory No.7’ – making it a lengthy gap before the first full-length. In light of this, it was a surprise to see Lowtide return last month with a new double A-side seven-inch, ‘Julia’/‘Spring’.

“We had a lot of the songs from the album written and recorded in some form or another for a while, so I guess we’d already started work on new ideas while the album was coming out,” says one of the band’s two bass-playing vocalists, Giles Simon. “So we felt more equipped to deal with some new stuff, but we don’t really run to any schedule in terms of releases and plans for how we’re going to put music out. It just happens as it happens.”

The two tracks aren’t quite brand new – ‘Julia’ is a cover of French post-punk/coldwave band Asylum Party (whose original version came out in 1988), while ‘Spring’ was left over from the Lowtide sessions. Nevertheless, these songs were shown just as much love as all the band’s previous releases.

“I like the economy of using and releasing all of the music that we’ve been writing and recording,” says Simon. “We ummed and ahhed about it a little bit, but we really like the songs and feel like it’s a good way to have a record of all the music we’ve been making. We’re not really a band that writes music and then discards it.”

Despite revolving around a strong pop hook, ‘Julia’ won’t be an obvious cover for listeners unfamiliar with the original. There can be a stigma attached to releasing covers as singles, but Lowtide inhabit the song to the point it doesn’t really matter who wrote it.

“We had a friend Alan [Solly, of Simon’s other project, Orange] send us the song via email, then we started playing around with it in rehearsals,” says Simon. “We weren’t worried about whether or not it was a cover as much as making it our own version, given that we have a limited palette in terms of what we’re prepared to do musically. We wanted to keep the music live, to use instruments that we play live and not to overproduce things in a recording sense.

“I was looking at the YouTube clip, that amazing video that was released for Asylum Party’s ‘Julia’ in ’88, and one of the comments was, ‘Back then everyone and his dog had a Yamaha DX7,’ which is the keyboard you see front and centre of the video clip. Gabe [Lewis] prides himself on making as wild an amount of sound as he can out of his guitar and nothing else. That’s the kind of thing we’re interested in, more so than whether or not strategically it’s a good idea to be releasing a cover as a single.”

Although they didn’t alter their technical set-up to match the original, in terms of tone and structure Lowtide haven’t deviated too far. “It’s definitely a homage in that sense,” says Simon. “The point is, we feel like whenever we play a song, it’s going to sound like Lowtide given the way the band is set up.”

The world has become a vastly different place since the original ‘Julia’ was released 27 years ago. So from a thematic point of view, Lowtide’s version gives the song a new significance. “I was thinking about it as maybe a nostalgia for the Gillard era,” says Simon. “I like re-establishing a song that had nothing to do with the context in which we are, [with] which we can then make contextual relationships to what our situation is. I’m interested in the idea of how songs can become traditional. Say the way that folk music became traditional, and it was more the recordings and interpretations and performances of songs than the authorial originality of the music.”

The other half of the disc, ‘Spring’, picks up precisely where Lowtide left off. It’s hard to find any critical feedback on the album that doesn’t use the descriptors ‘shoegaze’ and ‘dream-pop’. But while the sound of the band suggests the members have a deep interest in those genres, taste and creativity don’t always directly correspond.

“Songwriting-wise, I feel like I really cemented the way I write and approach writing music probably over ten years ago,” says Simon. “But at the same time, I’ve been listening to a pretty broad range of music recently. With Lowtide, we come together with mutual interests in these broadly defined genres of guitar pop music and that’s where we try to keep it focused. Everyone has their own interests – Lucy [Buckeridge, co-vocalist] has a pretty deep soft spot for country music and I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music, like Laurie Spiegel and Éliane Radigue. But I see a relationship still between the music that we make and my music interests generally.

“But it’s more that we have a certain approach to making music and we use basic musical tropes to approach our songwriting. We’re playing bass, guitar, drums and singing – it’s not a groundbreaking set-up for a rock band. We’re not trying to be too experimental in any sense.”

[Lowtide photo by Callum Thomson]

Lowtide, supported by Terza Madre and Raindrop, play Newtown Social Club on Sunday August 30.

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