The Great Emu War Casualties return with their brand new single Cold Food Ave, unveiling a rowdier side to their sound just months after the release of their debut album Public Sweetheart No. 1. The new track is the first taste of the Melbourne-based band’s forthcoming five-track EP Mal Du Siecle, due for release on 6th November, and finds the uniquely international four-piece swapping some of their debut’s more polished indie-pop instincts for an unruly blast of garage-rock energy.
The Great Emu War Casualties
Cold Food Ave arrives in a full-force rush of searing lead guitar, pounding rhythms and hollered gang vocals. It is loud, loose and deliberately chaotic, while vocalist and guitarist Joe Jackson’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics dart between non-sequiturs, observations and self-doubt with an instinctive sense of humour. Beneath the racket, however, sits a more reflective idea: the uncertainty of trying to work out where life is heading when nobody can actually know what is around the corner.
Jackson traces the song back to his time living in Liverpool, where he encountered someone who repeatedly offered unsolicited advice as he was beginning to establish himself as an independent artist. “When I lived in Liverpool, I used to know a guy who thought he was hot shit and would always try to give me advice back when I was first getting started,” he explains.
The advice he received was simple enough: nobody cares where you’ve been, only where you’re going. But for an artist still attempting to discover his own voice without a clear plan for the future, it only added to the pressure. “Whether he was right or wrong, to hear this at a time when I had no plan, I was working independently and trying to figure out my path day by day – it was not helpful to hear,” Jackson says.
Cold Food Ave ultimately turns that frustration into something more universal. Jackson has come to realise that certainty about the future is largely an illusion, regardless of how confident somebody might appear. “What I have learnt though is that nobody really knows where they’re going,” he says. “They might know where they want to go and people have all sorts of ideas, but you never know what’s around the corner and this song explores all of that – plus you can never predict the kind of impact you’re going to have on anybody.”
There is still room for a punchline, though. “I realised that guy was a bit of prick to me, ha!”
If Cold Food Ave provides an indication of where the band are heading, Mal Du Siecle promises to be another deliberately unpredictable release. Across its five tracks, The Great Emu War Casualties continue to resist being confined to a single genre, moving between sparkling panoramic indie-pop, brighter synth-rock and dancefloor-friendly post-punk.
The band’s influences span the likes of LCD Soundsystem, Everything Everything, Foals, Talking Heads and Two Door Cinema Club, but Mal Du Siecle appears less interested in neatly reproducing any of those sounds than in embracing the restless creativity that connects them. The EP’s title takes its name from a French phrase historically used to describe a sense of ennui and disillusionment, a fitting description for a record that appears to balance uncertainty and introspection with a distinctly playful energy.
For bassist and vocalist Saskia Clapton, recording the release also meant embracing an unusual environment. “We recorded it in the desert…and I don’t regret it,” she says.
The EP was written by Jackson and Clapton, who also produced the record alongside GRAMMY®-nominated producer Alex Newport. Newport engineered the sessions at his studio in Joshua Tree before mixing the finished release. The unusual circumstances surrounding the band’s development are reflected in the band’s own story. The Great Emu War Casualties describe themselves, with characteristic humour, as presumably the only British, Australian and Nepalese band in existence.
Jackson and Clapton first met in Liverpool before gradually finding their way back across the world to Clapton’s home city of Melbourne. There they recruited drummer Bibek Samang online, with Cat Sanzaro completing the lineup shortly before the recording of Public Sweetheart No. 1. The members joke that they bonded over desperation and shared trauma, but the chemistry that has developed between them has produced a band increasingly comfortable with throwing contrasting ideas into the same musical space.
That approach was already evident on Public Sweetheart No. 1, their debut album, which established The Great Emu War Casualties as a band with an appetite for inventive songwriting, bright melodies and an innate sense of humour. Their early career has already included a support slot with The Hold Steady, while their rapidly developing reputation has brought increasing attention to their particular blend of indie rock, pop experimentation and dry wit.
Now, with Cold Food Ave, they are taking that creative restlessness somewhere louder. The track’s garage-rock attack represents a noticeable shift in emphasis, but the band’s identity remains intact. The guitars are abrasive, the rhythm section is relentless and the vocals are delivered with the kind of communal energy that makes the track feel designed for a crowded room. At the same time, Jackson’s lyrics retain the band’s ability to find humour in uncertainty. The song may be about trying to understand where you are going, but it refuses to pretend that anyone has the answers.
With Mal Du Siecle arriving in November, The Great Emu War Casualties look set to continue embracing that uncertainty rather than attempting to resolve it. If the debut introduced the band’s colourful, genre-hopping instincts, the new EP appears ready to push those instincts further – with Cold Food Ave leading the charge.
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