Image by Jordan Malane //

Having drip-fed us tunes over the past 18 months the South Coast share a new single and deets about LP #3.

Constantly pulled down different creative avenues, from punk to garage to psych to 60s pop, the six-piece are seemingly on a quest to never produce the same song twice. This time, The Pinheads are showcasing their knack for balladry with ‘Rain Down’, a folkish earworm complete with bouncily strummed acoustics, fiddles and an anthemic chorus.

It’s hard to listen to the track without the recent floods coming to mind, though it was during a different catastrophic environmental event that the song was written. As frontman Jez Player explains, ‘Rain Down’ was something of a plea for water to remedy the fires that much of NSW, including areas of the Pinheads’ hometown of Wollongong, was experiencing at the time.

“‘Rain Down’ was written around the time of the 2019/20 bushfires,” he says. “Walking out of the studio and instantly overcome with the dryness and heat of the evening air – the air was heavy with the smell of burning lands and homes. It is devastating seeing what we needed during that time (rain), is completely consuming us now.”

The accompanying clip, shot by drummer James Kates, sees a fittingly soggy Player traipsing around the coastline on Dharawal country as rain buckets down. “As with every film clip, I had no idea what I was doing. I just showed up, loaded my camera and buttoned on when it felt right,” Kates says.

“Jez and I ended up shooting in a bunch of different locations around The Royal National Park in the hope of capturing some natural magic in whatever way it presented itself. One of the days we decided to trek into a waterfall that we’d heard cascaded into the ocean. As fate would have it, it’d been raining for about two years straight so it was really popping.”

“The kind of imagery more so reserved for somewhere on the other side of the planet. I’d always felt the song wasn’t so much literal and was more about liberation and feeling free. If the imagery can enhance the song or at least not make it any worse then I’ve done my job. Hope you enjoy this pocket of beauty we’re attempting to put out into the world in such a chaotic time.”

The track is taken from their forthcoming album, Mirror, which is due July 8th on Farmer & The Owl/BMG. Head here to presave it.