Sydney’s Bored Shorts’ Looking Up captures the sentiments of our 20’s and spits it out in neat guitar-lead pop.

Having spent the last couple of years gigging, tinkering and expanding, Bored Shorts debut EP has seemingly been a long time coming. A couple of tracks on Dinosaur City Records mixtapes and some singles, including FBI favourite ‘Day & Age,’ has shown us the group is more than capable of delivering Australiana-tinged pop tunes with memorable melodies that you can have a bit of a shake to.

And now the wait for new music is over, with the five-piece dropping their debut EP Looking Up today. It’s 20 minutes of shimmering guitars, thoughtful harmonies, and introspective lyricism that looks at the issues young men in their 20’s face, and expresses them in the simplest of language, which is no easy feat.

You can catch Bored Shorts playing King Street Crawl this Sunday at Leadbelly (info here) and check out our interview with drummer Will Blackburn below:

Tell us about the EP title. Why are Bored Shorts looking up?

You know when you wake up and – for a split second – you’re feeling great. And then all of your worries and heartbreaks and ghosts of relationships past wash over you like some kind of cold and unwelcome wave?

Well, we’ve had a lot of that over the past few years in Sydney. Pretty much consistently. And the songs on the EP mostly reflect all of these feelings, sat at the foot our beds waiting for us to wake up.

But now, penned our thoughts, aired our sins and paid some kind of musical penance, things are really looking up now. Which is why the EP is titled so.

That, and we’ve always had terrible posture.

You wrote the EP a couple of years ago, what took so long to get it out?

We all play in bands that have been sucked into the long and drawn-out protocols of Label Land. It’s a beautiful place, but it can be frustrating sometimes.

We umm’d and aahhh’d for a long time about doing the same thing with Bored Shorts. About strategizing and planning and amplifying and targeting and synergy and biofuels.

Then we agreed to just do it ourselves. It sounded kind of fun! Turns out it’s actually probably more stressful and now, if it flops, we can only really blame ourselves.

Sorry it’s taken so long, but the wi-fi at our place is shitty and Tunecore takes ages to upload stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXuOBRdBZYM

You’ve recently expanded into becoming a five-piece. What was the motivation behind that? How has it changed how you sound/do things?

Well, Slipknot has 9 people so we’re really only half as sick as them.

Mostly everything you hear on the EP was played by Dom, Charles and me, that’s Will. We hit the studio before giving any thought to how Bored Shorts could shape up playing live. We really shot ourselves in the foot with that one.

Nick came on board so we could play the songs on stage without them sounding completely terrible. Turns out, he was so good that we immediately asked him to become a permanent member.

Ash offered to play synth for us via a well-worded email. We like people that show initiative, so we asked her to join. She’s also one of the most talented songwriters we’ve ever known so that was a total bonus.

We sound heaps better now.

There’s a real 80’s Australiana feel to Bored Shorts’ singles so far. Something of a Go-Betweens/Triffids vibe. What sort of music were you guys listening to when writing Looking Up?

Dick Diver, The Bats, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, The Ocean Party, Wu-Tang Clan, Centrelink hold music, our silent screams, the heavy breathing of the Dominos guy and Carly Rae Jepsen.

You guys have a lot of projects going on in other bands, how do you know when a song is a Bored Shorts song?

Dom and I (me, Will that’s who) have been making dodgy Garageband songs since we met as teenagers in WA.

That process hasn’t changed, just now we have a band name to release them under.

Your songs seem to focus around your experiences of love/society/life as young adults, as if you’ve gotten through the worst of it and have come out the other side. What sort of advice would you give yourselves five years ago? What song would you play to yourselves?

We’d tell our 19-year-old selves to invest in Bitcoin, there’s no money in music.

Dom says he would play himself Caught Up, because it’s about moving out of home. Seems relatable.

I would play myself Fire, to prove to past me that I can write song without drums in it. And I’m a flame lord.

What’s coming up now the EP is out?

A true-crime podcast and an album’s worth of new songs, probably.