INAUGURAL, Photograph by Olive Rush
Sydney duo INAUGURAL want to tell stories about real people.
The band’s new EP, Stone Tapes Vol. 1, includes stories of redemption, revenge, trauma and suicide, as well as a love song to disgruntled black sheep, and an 80s ballad about armed security guards.
“The Stone Tape theory is the idea that traumatic events can imprint themselves onto places and replay over time,” say band members Phillip Spiteri and Alice Amsel. “This collection of songs was heavily inspired by that idea, telling a story of these moments. If you look hard enough, you can find a common thread tying it all together.”
INAUGURAL’s musical influences are as varied as their themes, taking in bardcore, trashy EDM club bangers, Playboi Carti and Enya, with a firm grounding in 80s and 90s goth and post-punk.
“With billionaires dominating the musical charts – people who are completely out of touch with everyday humans – we want to share stories of struggle and happiness from places that aren’t completely made up,” say the band. “We embody characters that we see as being people who deserve to be spoken about, even if we don’t 100% always agree with them. We can tell stories of how people end up in bad places and how they can get out of them.”
Stone Tapes Vol. 1 is out now. INAUGURAL’s Phil and Alice tell us about the sounds and ideas underpinning the record’s six songs.
Fortune
Influences: Enya, Peter Gabriel, drug abuse, redemption, mum listening to Enya. Alice and I both loving Enya.
Phil: Story of redemption. Originally the story was to write a song about dumb luck. Where I grew up in regional NSW is a lot different from the big cities. Meth is really rampant, but behind a lot of addiction is the sweetest person you’ve ever met. I wanted to tell a story that honours this part of people. That sometimes bad decisions and addiction don’t define a person. This is the story we want to tell.
Covet
Influences: Late 80s and early 90s industrial. No wave meets alt pop.
Alice: Being Korean means I yearn for revenge a lot. I tend to channel whatever feelings (mostly rage, let’s be real) I have towards people that have really done damage to me into art because the alternative means going to jail.
Mall Cop With an AK
Influences: Playboi Carti. Melancholic melodies over really masculine lyrics. Heartbreaking 80s music.
Phil: The song came from when I was at a prominent shopping centre a handful of weeks after some drama went down there. The security had guns and bulletproof vests. I felt like this was overkill; to make civilians fear the presence of the security. And I thought about the power one must feel when coming to work and being given a gun. What drove them there, to join the strip mall militia? The song kind of wrote itself, and I was walking around this shopping centre saying, “Mall cop with an AK.”
Kill Your Darlings
Influences: ANTI-era Rihanna, Deftones.
Alice: I wanted to write something that sounds just like your classic break-up song but it actually isn’t about relationships at all. The song is really about the artistic process and how you have to sometimes be ruthless in editing, trimming the fat, so to speak.
Nightclub (Nightclub Suicide)
Influences: Bardcore. Buzz Kull. Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son – fantastic work but god awful concept that is not something you’d want to hang on your wall. EDM Club bangers.
Phil: The song is actually called Nightclub Suicide, but we would get shadow banned for saying the S word, which I guess is partly why we wrote it. The concept behind Nightclub was to write a club anthem that could never be played in clubs. It would be something that people who came to see us live would 100% understand. It kinda did exactly as it was intended because no radio stations could play it. But that’s the joy of being an artist.
I feel with things like AI slop taking over playlists and radio stations, with major record labels partnering up with AI companies, writing something so anti- could mean that we’re writing something that a computer couldn’t. I think we’ll end up seeing this play out as a trend in the years ahead.
Strigoi
Influences: Vampire movies, mid to late 90s goth music.
Alice: This is a little love song to the very disgruntled teenage goth Alice and to all other disgruntled black sheep. It’s also a bit tongue in cheek, poking good-hearted fun at myself too. I am an art school alumni wanker who studied art in Berlin so I’m ripe for some light roasting. But it is also very much a love letter to the misfits of the world.
Get INAUGURAL’s Stone Tapes Vol. 1 here.
Join our weekly newsletter
