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We caught up with Johnny Took of DMA’S to hear all about the making of their self-titled fifth album and more…

Call it vindication, call it reinvigoration, but things are feeling pretty good in the camp for DMA’S right now. The trio have recently performed their biggest UK headline shows, touring the 10-year anniversary of their debut LP Hills End, signed a global record deal, and hit the 500 million streams mark. Big milestones in a decade-long career that would have most artists looking wide-eyed into the great expansive future.

But they’ve gone the opposite way.

Their new album DMA’S was predominantly recorded at their new studio in Sydney, and mostly produced by the band themselves – taking things back to those early days when they were the band who famously got signed off the back of their bedroom recordings, without ever playing a show.

This return is reflected in the music too. They’ve brought along the studio tricks and trimmings they’ve picked up along the way while tapping into that anthemic rawness that turned them into one of the country’s biggest exports seemingly overnight all those years ago.

These guys have always been a band who’ve treated their songs as a communal experience – you can’t go to a DMA’S show without someone putting their arm around you and raising a beer in one hand – so it’s not fair to say the new album is about fan service, but it’s certainly ticking every box that longtime fans will be lapping up. There are tracks like ‘Windows’ which are gonna be huge sing-alongs live, ‘Killing Time’ and ‘Distance’ which will inject that mid-set energy, and ‘Heatin Park’ and opener ‘El Alamein’ which are gonna melt some minds.

We spoke with Johnny Took about the new album, their legendary Like A Version, and more. Check it out below and head here to buy/stream DMA’S now, and grab tickets to their Aus shows here

I saw the Hills End shows in Europe went off, some of your biggest shows ever. Was it mostly older fans coming back to the album, or were you seeing a younger crowd discovering it for the first time?

Do you know what it was? It was a little bit of both. That was one thing that I was really shocked about playing those reunion shows for the 10 year of Hills End, because there were these kids. I was like, is that demographic getting younger?

But it’s something that you don’t think about when you’re making a record. There were records I loved when I was 10, 11, 12, you know, and then now 10 years later, some of these people are coming to the shows as 18, 19-year-olds and saying, “Hey, when I was a kid, me and my dad used to put on this record and dance in our living room to ‘Lay Down’ and stuff like that.”

So they’ve kind of attached these childhood memories with their parents to this album, and then you don’t think about them 10 years later going, “I love that record. I’m going to go see it live start to finish.”

You’ve said ‘Hills End’ and the new album are kind of connected. How so?

Yeah. I think we’re excited to do the two sets where we’re playing a lot of the new album and then doing the 10-year anniversary set as well for these big shows in November, December. And I would say they are kind of linked. That’s probably why we also called this album “DMA’S”. It’s taken us up to our fifth album to have a self-titled record.

In the same way that a lot of Hills End was, we did quite a lot of those early recordings in my apartment in Newtown that we were living at the time, and there’s a big DIY aspect to it.

Then the second album we did with Kim from The Presets, and then Stuart Price and Conkersting and stuff like that for the next one. We’ve learned so much along the way from working with all these producers, but we kind of felt like now was a time to come back to our roots and lean back into, particularly, guitar-style songs after kind of going on a dance-rock tangent.

You guys have always talked about ‘Frankensteining’ songs together. Has that process changed much in the 10 years since Hills End?

Yeah, we definitely still Frankenstein a lot, to be honest. There’s a song on the record called ‘Windows’ that we worked on in Nashville because Mason and I were doing a writing session over there. I think I was working on another song at the time with JT, who was one of the producers, and Mason was in the upstairs studio going through song memos. He almost Frankensteined it out of his own memos up there.

Then we came down and wrote the lyrics together downstairs. I try and do that now as well. I’m kind of taking a little bit more time with my songwriting now, almost months, where I can work out that maybe this verse or this melody that I cherish so much could work with this other one.

Sometimes it takes years, though. We still definitely do Frankenstein, but we even do it on a solo level now as well.

Heaps of artists go back and do another ‘Like A Version’ a few years later. Would you guys ever do another one, or is there too much pressure after winning the Hottest Like A Version of all time?

I think it’s a funny one with that Like A Version thing, because the way we stumbled upon that Cher cover was almost just having a laugh in the soundcheck. Mason was playing the song and mimicking the auto-tune sound, trying to make his voice sound like auto-tune.

Then Tommy came out and started singing and we’re like, “Whoa.” We already knew it was a good song, but then hearing Tommy do that, we’re like, “Wow.”

Unless a moment like that happens where we feel like, “Oh, that is a great cover, that should be done in a really special way,” it’s hard to ever think that we would go back and do Like A Version and it wouldn’t be worse. It’s kind of always going to be worse. Do you know what I mean?

And then after winning the Like A Version of all time, it does put a little bit more pressure on it. The numbers are against us for it to be any better. I’m sure it would still be a fun, cool cover, but it will always be less than that experience.

We thought about it, but I think unless we were like, “This song really means a lot to us,” or, “This is really unique, this particular cover,” we’re not really rushing into it anytime soon.

You recorded parts of the album all over the place, but what did having your own studio in Sydney change about the process?

Yeah, that was a massive thing, particularly for Mason. Mason lives in that studio and he’s just done some amazing work on this record. He was living in that studio pretty much for six months.

There’s a danger to almost not having a deadline. Sometimes you work with a producer and you’re like, “I’ve got three weeks in London with this guy,” and you kind of have to get everything done in that three weeks.

There’s a bit of a tug of war going on with yourself where you’re like, “I’ve got as much time as I want to produce this.” But sometimes deadlines can be good and you don’t want to just drag things out, because sometimes you can move away from something that’s actually really great and it becomes a little bit contrived because you’ve thought about it too much.

I think we found a nice happy medium between not dragging it out too long, but also being able to have that creative freedom to not be rushed, which is always a really nice feeling.

‘Emailz’ jumped out at me as one that feels like it could be a real grower. Which track do you think is the dark horse on the album?

That’s another one of Mason’s babies, which is such a beautiful, beautiful song. For me, it’s ‘Windows’, which was that one I mentioned before. There’s just something about it.

I think even when you think of certain songs that have resonated with people with DMA’S, you had ‘Delete’, ‘Silver’ and even the Cher cover. There’s something particularly beautiful about the simplistic nature of an acoustic guitar and Tommy’s voice when it’s resonating in those right frequencies.

I kind of feel like ‘Windows’ has that for me. One I’m really excited to see how people respond to is a track called ‘Dancing Lock’, which is one of my favourites. It’s not really a single or anything like that, but it’s one of my favourite vocal performances by Tommy.

I remember when we were doing it. It’s quite a hard melody to sing and he makes it just seem so effortless. He has a real knack for doing that. It’s really beautiful.

You’re a Chelsea fan, right?

Correct.

Would you rather win a Grammy or have Chelsea win the treble?

Oh, probably… you’d have to take the Grammy. I think Chelsea have won enough trophies in their time. But at the same time, if Chelsea won, the treble would make a lot of people happy. It’d also make a lot of people angry. It’s a hard one.

You’ve never played the Opera House before, have you?

No. I mean, I think we’re going to try and film that one as well, because it’s pretty iconic. It’s a decent crowd down there and just the view, it’d be a good one to film and to make a special moment of it, you know.