‘We have our sights set on world domination': How Spacey Jane became Australia's biggest band
In August 2022, Caleb Harper was sitting in his underwear in a sweltering room in Los Angeles, willing the air-conditioner to work. The Spacey Jane frontman had just begun scribbling down the first lines of a song that would become August, the first track to emerge from their third album.
But it wasn't coming easily in the 40-degree heat and the song ended up sitting on the shelf for about 18 months, Harper occasionally pulling it down to tweak a line here or there. Other songs came and were put to tape, the album was nearly tied up, but August remained out-of-reach.
'I had a counter melody that wasn't working,' Harper says over Zoom from Los Angeles, air-conditioning working this time. 'I ended up writing it on the last morning, and Peppa [Lane, bassist] and I went in and sang it that day.'
That final counter melody carries out the track with the floating refrain 'if that makes sense?', which the band then lifted for the album's title. 'It really bookends that period,' Harper says, noting its meaning shifted considerably over the writing period, from a meditation on leaving Australia to predicting the beginning of a breakup. 'It's a hard listen, honestly.'
August, like the rest of If That Makes Sense, was written and recorded over two years in LA – the first time the Perth band had recorded outside Australia. It was a big deal for the quartet (Harper and Lane are joined by drummer Kieran Lama and guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu), who have been synonymous with the Australian indie rock scene since their jangly, vulnerable 2020 debut album Sunlight.
Sunlight was borne from the runaway single Booster Seat, which reached #2 in that year's Hottest 100, behind Glass Animals' Heat Waves. The band would become frequent Hottest 100 lurkers: in the 2022 countdown, following their second album Here Comes Everybody, they featured six times, three of those coming in the top 10. In 2022, the band was the third-biggest seller of vinyl for the year, behind Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. They've ridden this wave of popularity on numerous sold-out tours of the country, and are comfortable standalone headliners for the biggest local festivals. There aren't many bigger bands in Australian music right now, if any.
Following the gruelling touring schedule for Here Comes Everybody (which had really stretched back years to the start of Sunlight), the band's management stepped in and told them to take a break. 'It started as quite a difficult thing,' Harper says. 'It was almost counterintuitive … We are a band that considers our job to play shows. It was almost like the music served that. Now we've gone through a process of unlearning that and figuring out how to focus on making this record and pulling this world together first. And also giving the market a bit of space, from a business perspective.
'But once we hopped off that train, we were all freaked out. Especially, because we were living all around the world, we didn't see each other as much.'
Like many Australian artists before him, Harper landed in LA and endured the merry-go-round of songwriting sessions – a process he called 'f---ing terrifying'. 'I'd always been protective of the songwriting process, and it always has been in my bedroom,' he says. 'I didn't know how to advocate for ideas that I liked, and I didn't know how to say no to things I didn't like. I would often not put forward ideas at all because I was just like, 'If they don't like it, that's embarrassing'. But now I find it's liberating to have that conflict of ideas. I'm grateful that I went through that transition.'
It's easy to understand Harper's apprehension. His lyrics have always been intensely personal, and the songs on If That Makes Sense feature some wrenching moments. On the churning single All the Noise, Harper reflects on his upbringing: 'And that was the way that they gave to me … A promise that I would hurt everybody that I ever meet'.
Then there's the shouted, tortured mantra in So Much Taller: 'You'll never be enough and you'll never be loved, and the fact you tried is embarrassing enough'. Recent single Through My Teeth obliquely references Harper shedding his religious upbringing and throwing himself headlong into partying at university.
A lot of the album pulls in this direction and sifts through the various answers to the question: what happens when you have to drag your trauma into adulthood? 'Being out here,' Harper says after a pause, after we bring up Through My Teeth, 'it's almost like pulling myself out of my present life in Australia made the past compress, like the last 26 years of my life were all just in one accessible bank in a way that they hadn't been before'.
'All of a sudden things didn't seem as far away – not that they were any clearer,' he says. 'I still have trouble recalling much of my childhood, as I think a lot of people do, especially if they have negative things associated with that … Your brain tends to bury things or contort them. But I think a lot of it became far clearer or more in my face than it had been before.'
Being away from Australia pulled some things into focus, but it also brought with it a lot of homesickness and guilt. 'I think family is the main one,' Harper answers, when I ask where the guilt comes from. 'There's already a host of issues and contentious things there. Being away is an interesting escape from that.
'But sometimes I take too much liberty when it comes to escaping things back home. Like I'm really bad at messaging my friends back, I'm really bad at calling my dad … and that's just something that weighs on me a lot. Relationships suffer, and you feel like it's your fault.'
'We'd be kicking ourselves if we didn't try [to break overseas].'
Caleb Harper, frontman of Spacey Jane
Sonically, If That Makes Sense doesn't deviate wildly from the Spacey Jane playbook, but the band have beefed things up considerably with undercurrents of synths and layers upon layers of guitars and vocals. It's the result of taking a longer time in the studio, and the presence of big-time producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, the 1975, Wolf Alice).
'We didn't shy away from producing it, like really producing it,' Harper says. 'It was like, 'Let's put everything in here that we like and make it feel as big and wide as possible'.'
The band also ran the entire record through tape at the end, a process that rounds out the sound and makes it feel richer, warmer (like the difference between an MP3 file and a vinyl record).
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The four members of the band have been scattered in the wind over the past few years – Hardman-Le Cornu and Lane in Melbourne, Lama in New York, Harper between LA and home. If That Makes Sense represents a big step outside their Australia-sized comfort zone, and Harper says the band is feeling the pull overseas.
'Australia still feels like home for us in every way, and we still feel like that's where our strongest support base is,' he says. 'But at the same time, we have our sights set on world domination, and we want to do what we've done here in Australia. That's why we've put ourselves out here so much and why so much focus is on the rest of the world.
'We'd be kicking ourselves if we didn't try [to break overseas]. We're very hungry to see how far we can take this thing, so we're just going to keep going.'
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