Comprised of Fergus Linacre (lead vocals), Alex Laska (guitar and backing vocals), Jeremy “Mango” Hunter (bass and backing vocals), and Justin Debrincat (drums and backing vocals), the Melbourne, Australia-based quartet Kingwswood formed in 2009. And after the release of three singles “Yeah Go Die,” “Medusa,” and “She’s My Baby” in 2012, the quartet started to receive national attention as the band toured Australia with The Living End, British India and The Saints, and made appearances at several of the country’s largest musical festivals including Splendour In The Grass, Queenscliff Music Festival and Pyramid Rock.
Building on the growing national buzz, the band followed a successful 2013 with the release of their fourth single “Ohio” and their critically applauded Change of Heart EP, a national tour with Grinspoon, opening for Aerosmith during the legendary band’s Australian tour, and appearing at several festivals including Groovin The Moo, Big Pineapple, Festival of The Sun, Golden Days and Big Day Out Festivals.
Last year, the band went to Blackbird Studio in Nashville to record their full-length debut album, Microscopic Wars with the three-time Grammy Award winning producer/sound engineer Vance Powell, who worked on The Raconteurs‘ Consoler of the Lonely and Jack White‘s Blunderbuss, and the Melbourne-based quartet’s debut effort was a critical and commercial success as it landed at number six on the ARIA Albums Chart and was nominated for Best Rock Album in last year’s ARIA Music Awards. Adding to a rapidly growing national profile, the band had been nominated Best Live Band by Rolling Stone Australia and Best Rock Work at the ARPA Music Awards.
Naturally, after gaining such success in a relatively quick period of time, the members of Kingswood are set on making waves Stateside, as their single “Ohio” has been featured in Netflix‘s Bloodlines. In fact, the band will be playing two sets at this year’s CMJ Festival, which could potentially bring them quite a bit of exposure here in New York and across the country — but in the meantime, let’s talk about “Ohio,” a song which consists of bluesy and subtly twangy guitar chords, throbbing bass chords and propulsive drumming paired with falsetto vocals. Unsurprisingly, the song channels The Black Keys, Jack White and others as its aesthetic is clearly inspired by the sounds of the early 1970s and the blues — and although warmly familiar, the Melbourne-based quartet manage to evoke that period with a quite a bit of self-assured swagger while being incredibly sexy.
Before their upcoming Stateside/CMJ appearances, the band released a track-length edit of “Ohio” from a short film, with the awesome title Some Mother Fucker’s Gotta Pay and the video appears to be inspired by the stylized, bloody violence of Quentin Tarantino films as the video features the band and several crews of The Warriors-like gangs in a bloody and deadly gunfight.
