If you listen to music often enough, you know that there’s probably been a time when you were bored, late at night, and decided to go to your favorite band’s profile on Spotify. You don’t necessarily do this to listen to what you already know is your favorite band, but you do it to just aimlessly go through their related artists, purposely looking to dive deep into the rabbit hole with hopes that maybe you’ll find your new favorite band. You never know, really, how long this will take, but you’re willing to take the plunge. Because as much power as your favorite band has over your listening desires, there’s something to be said for when you discover something new and it clicks immediately.
I have spent aplenty of nights doing this, and though the route that brought me to Castlecomer was a little different, the end result was the same. Upon immediately listening to “Fire Alarm” and “All of the Noise,” I knew that the band had something special going for them and I immediately wanted to bring them to the attention of you — whoever you are and wherever you are right now — who is currently reading this.
Castlecomer — pronounced castle-coma — is a band that has a sound somewhere between indie and pop-rock, with beats that will make you want to get up and just dance to the beat. They currently live in the states, based in Los Angeles, though they originally formed in Sydney, Australia at ages 19/20 to create a “Skinny white dude pop band and see what happens,” as Bede explains to me during our interview.
The story of the beginning of this band, though, is one that Bede admits is not out of the ordinary. He describes their getting together, trying to figure out who plays what instruments, writing some music and performing some gigs. “Before you know it, you’ve played five other gigs and you’ve got an album’s wroth of material,” he explains. He stresses that it has been hard work, and they spent a lot of time perfecting their craft and getting better at writing. “All great things require not only time, but lots of thought, and we’ve really perfected most aspects of this band with time,” he stated before highlighting how there’s not much that can derail the band due to their attitude, “We try to take things lightly and have fun. We take the music seriously, but you have to find a good balance.”
If you’re curious on what prompted Castlecomer to pack up and move to the United States, you’re not alone. It was a question I almost immediately posed, curious as to what drew them to this country, specifically. We felt like we had played almost every venue in the country and had sort of seen or done things to a point where we felt like we wanted to make the leap. Things were happening for us in America that we hadn’t felt anywhere else in the world. You’ve got to follow your bloody dream,” Bede proclaims. “You get lucky every once in a while. We wake up one day and your song has 100,000 streams. There are all of these things you do up until this point to get there, and we felt that with America, that the [music] industry was kind of calling us over there — we had quite a big fanbase there. We decided we were gonna give it 18 months and give it a shot, and if not, go back to Australia.”
There are a few cultural differences between the U.S. and Australia, especially when you decide to pack up and leave everything behind to chase your dream in a new country. Bede jokingly highlights that his favorite things in the U.S. are Jimmy Dean and Planet Fitness — being particularly fond of Planet Fitness’ showers and membership options. “There’s a lot more radio stations and they’re starting to play our music: Sirius XM, iHeart stations. We’ve got some really good support with some bands we haven’t announced yet,” he explains in a more serious manner. He later quips that “Even just the fact that we’ve come from australia and booked a six week tour with 200 cap venues and they sell out, it’s like ‘Who the fuck are these people?’ We’ve never been over here before, this is fucking awesome. It’s like ‘Hell yeah, i could do this forever.'”
Castlecomer really started taking off with their single “Fire Alarm” that at one point was at #6 on Spotify’s Global Viral chart — it now has over six million streams on the streaming service. This is something that Bede is quick to explain that they do not take it’s success for granted in any way, and their desire to still appreciate all of the things they achieve.
“You release anything before that, you bang out five songs and put it on the internet and you get like 5,000 streams after a month. And you’re like, ‘No one’s hearing my music.’ And then, you sort of reevaluate yourself and wonder if you’re writing good enough songs. And one day you write a really good song, put it on the internet, and wind up with 100,000 in one week, 500,000 in a month,” he explains before going on to describe being hit up by producers and managers looking to work with Castlecomer. “You see the credit linings of these names and these managers and labels and you’re like ‘holy shit.’ And they’re asking you to come to America — that’s the dream.” Coming to the U.S. and achieving success here was something that Bede mentions they all dreamed about for four years, and while they’ve achieved some great things, “There’s so much we want to do in this country; we wanna play new shows and do as much as possible.”
I spoke with Bede in late-September, and while it was just before their self-titled album was released (you can pick it up here), he did provide some background on the release. Most of the songs were written back in Australia, and were written over a six-month period. Outside of that, the recording took about a grand total of two weeks, which included 2-3 day sessions over six months. Expanding on what exactly that looks like, he explains that he would “Just sit in a room with a guitar…just get ideas, record it into my phone, figure out the chords, figure out what the song’s gonna be about, play it on a speaker for everyone else, then we record and master it,” and that this was the process for the entire release. “We recorded it in four studios with three producers — it was kind of like a money and timing thing. We learned what it costs to make an album: 10-15k Aussie dollars. We kinda were able to get two (producers) together, go in for two days, and we did that four times,” Bede explains. He also mentions that they will toy around with how this recording was done when it comes time to work on their next album, which they have already begun kicking around ideas for.
If the idea of working with different producers sounds complicated, it’s because it was, in ways. Bede mentions that it’s mainly complicated with how each producer works and what their style really is, highlighting that it can be one hundred percent night and day going from one producer to another. “Some of them we were in a huge studio where we slept over for 2 nights with a lot of drinking and partying and debauchery that kind of led to a more laid back approach. Or, we were in a city studio with a strict time-frame working from 8am-12am being super focused. We would record our parts, go to the day job, come back and evaluate what we had done that day.”
Interestingly enough, the idea of a producer was one that was foreign entirely to Castlecomer. Prior to 2015 went the band released “Fire Alarm,” they were not entirely sure what the role of a producer was, as they just previously had used a studio where they just did demos. “Once we did a bit of research and got sick of our tunes not being heard by anyone, we got a producer. They know how to make our guitars sound like Foo Fighters, this guy knows how to make the drums sound like Two Door Cinema Club,” Bede wittily says in regards to their decision to getting a producer in on the recording process.
Being new to a producer and what their role is played a part in Castlecomer’s self-titled album turning out the way it did. Bede explains to me that “We’re only good at writing songs and playing them,” and that this prohibited them from experiencing as much as they maybe would have liked to. In fact, he shares that this is something he hopes they get the chance to do before the time comes for their next record. At the same time, he does want to make sure that everyone knows he’s still proud of this record. “I kind of like that this album is straight up our thoughts,” he says.
That sense of being proud of their debut, while still looking forward to experimenting more on the next is certainly a peculiar place to be in. It is entirely possible, though, to be happy with what you’ve done but want to still be better moving forward. That’s where Bede currently stands, specifically as he highlights some of the struggles that the band went through to even release the album. “We had a lot a shit. The problem is that when you have a family — when you’re in a band, when someone’s got shit going on in the family, it hits all of us,” he begins. “We had a few really soul changing moments and that’s effected our whole band. When everyone’s effected by it, it’s hard to get the ball rolling again when everyone’s feeling the same. We got through that, we stuck together, and still we came out with 11 bangers.”
Referring to that aforementioned adversity, Bede states that it “Just backs the fact that we want it so much. We want our music to be heard, and we wanna play these shows to a lot of people. From day one we’ve always had that in our minds and if we just keep that mentality, it’ll be hard for that to stop. I am very proud of that.”
Castlecomer’s debut self-titled album is out now. You can keep up with the band on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
