Image by Maclean Stephenson //

Sydney purveyors of gritty lovesick nostalgia return with the first single from their forthcoming record.

Over the past five years, I’ve been fumbling for the right words to sum up the sound of The Melodrones. On one side of the record they’re sonic serenaders with sugary 50s doo-wop coursing through their veins, on the other side they’re angsty post punks building these experimental fuzzy textures. Whatever box you want to put them in, their new single ‘No Good Memories’ pretty much sums up their addictive sound better than anything we’ve heard.

The track, which is the first from their upcoming debut self-titled record, is a ballad wrapped up in distortion and cynicism, a further subversion of both the genres that influence them and the contemporary stylings of a rock and roll band.

“It’s a sleazy and depraved song sung by a depraved man for depraved people,” says frontman Rik Saunders. “The lyrics are hypersexualised and extremely tongue in cheek to mimic the 50s rockers and Motown tracks it was inspired by. ‘No Good Memories’ came to me while I was doing some mindless work wishing I was elsewhere. I was gorging on Motown music. You can hear its influence in the way the vocals follow the riff and the type of chords the song uses. I learnt those chords from songs like ‘You Really Got a Hold On Me’.”

“The lyrics and melody came at the same time as I walked to the job site I was working on. I spent the next few hours internally humming, working out the structure in my head and by the end of the shift the song was written. The original title was ‘All Good Memories’ because I was so confident in the person I was dating that I thought no matter what happened in the future, I would always have good memories. Then she cheated on me and I haven’t thought about it since, absolutely nothing; it’s not ‘No Good Memories’ it is ‘No Memory’.”

Accompanying the track are visuals by longtime LWA favourite Throat Pasta, who cakes the band in glitchy VHS as they stand, shake and deliver:

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

You can catch The Melodrones live and in HD in Sydney at the Trocadero Room in Enmore as they launch the hell out of ‘No Good Memories’. Check out the details below and be sure to follow them on IG here for deets on that debut record: