Acclaimed and rising Aussie outfit and JOVM mainstays RVG — currently Romy Vager (vocals, guitar), Gregor’s and Hearing’s Reuben Bloxham (guitar), Rayon Moon‘s Marc Nolte (drums), and Isabelle Wallace (bass) — have released two critically applauded albums:
- 2017’s A Quality of Mercy, which was recorded live off the floor at Melbourne’s iconic rock ‘n’ roll pub, The Tote Hotel. Initially released to little fanfare, the album, much to their surprise received critical acclaim both nationally and internationally, landing on a number of end-of-year Best of Lists.
- 2020’s Victor Van Vugt-produced Feral was released by Fire Records globally, excluding Australia and New Zealand, where it was released by Our Golden Friend. The album received breathless praise nationally and internationally, with Rolling Stone Australia calling the album “the record of a lifetime.”
The Melbourne-based band’s highly-anticipated third album Brain Worms is slated for a June 2, 2023 release through Fire Records globally with Our Golden Friend releasing the album in Australia and New Zealand. Between the band’s members, Brain Worms captures the band at their most confident point they’ve ever been in as a band. Sonically, the album reportedly sees the band moving past their influences, trying new things and pushing themselves towards what they believe is their best album of their growing catalog to date.
“Hype is scary. After two years of COVID it felt like the hype had gone down so we were able to just do stuff,” RVG’s Romy Vager says. “This time around we were like, this is what we’re doing, we’re taking control, we’re taking risks, and we’re going to make an album that sounds big so that when we hear it on the radio we want to hear it again. If we could only make one more album, it would be this one.”
Deriving its title from the hyper-recognizable experience of each day bearing witness to a world of private obsession being aired out in the infinite, Brain Worms may not be wholly new territory for the acclaimed Melbourne post-punk outfit and its frontperson, but there is a newfound radical acceptance. Recorded in London’s Snap Studios with James Trevacus, the ten-song album surges with lush sounds and clear intentions — and the magic of an acoustic guitar, once owned by Kate Bush, given to her by Tears for Fears, who legend has it, wrote “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” on it.
Over the past couple of months I’ve written about three of the album’s singles:
- “Nothing Really Changes,” an angular, 80s New Wave-inspired track rooted in enormous arena rock friendly riffage, paired with the Aussie outfit’s long-held penchant for anthemic hooks and choruses and Vager’s lived-in, heart-worn-on-sleeve lyricism: The song features a narrator desperately missing someone while confronting the lingering ghosts of their relationship — with frustration, despair, anger and a begrudging acceptance. As the band’s Vager explains, the song “started off as a songwriting experiment to write something catchy with an obnoxious riff, a cross between Divinyls and ‘Smoke on the Water.‘ It’s a song about missing someone but protecting yourself from being hurt.”
- “Squid,” a rousing arena rock friendly anthem that brings Heaven Up Here-era Echo and the Bunnymen and Starfish-era The Church to mind: Swirling and shimmering guitar textures are paired with angular guitar attack, thunderous drumming, shout-along worthy hooks and choruses. But while rooted in an absurd, Kafkaesque-like nightmare in which the song’s narrator imagines what might happen if they were to go back in time, step on something and become a squid, Vager’s delivery is so desperately earnest and urgent that it feels very real.
- “Midnight Sun,” an urgent, hurtling ripper built around Vager’s defiant, furious delivery, jangling guitars, and a thunderous and propulsive rhythms action paired with the band’s unerring knack for rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses Fittingly, the song deals with matters of disbelief, and what it feels like to live in a culture — and a world — that often prefers to argue about semantics rather than save the world from burning. If it hits close to home, it fucking should. It’s our current hellscape, where we constantly deal with a seemingly unending and pervasive, cynical, self-serving stupidity and myopia.
Brain Worms‘ fourth and latest single, album opening “Common Ground” is a shimmering and anthemic ballad rooted in heart-worn-proudly-on-sleeve earnestness and lived-in personal experience. And at the center, Vager’s commanding presence, delivering the song’s lyrics with a mix of heartache, weariness, resignation, yearning, acceptance that can only come with the recognition of a relationship being over — irrevocably and irreparably over. “Common Ground” is in many ways about heartache and those moments of begrudging acceptance in our lives; but it’s also about the resolve to defiantly and proudly dust yourself off and figure out what’s next. If you’ve been there — and I have been many times in my life — the song speaks of the experience with a profound wisdom, unvarnished honesty and deep sense of hope.
“I think that there’s something relieving in knowing that no matter what you do you can’t sway certain peoples feelings for you,” says Vager. “I wrote ‘Common Ground’ in a deep depression but it has evolved into a mantra to tell myself that there are some things I am unable to change, and that’s okay.”
Directed by Tom Campbell and shot in a gorgeous black and white, the accompanying video for “Common Ground” features the members of RVG performing the song in the round at a local gym while dancer Jayden Lewis performs striking choreography by Zoee Marsh that sees Lewis physically struggling — first to get up off the floor, and then against his own body.
“Together we wanted to do something that was stripped back, reduced to its simplest form, with only the most basic and essential features,” Campbell explains. “There is no contrivance, no attempt to cover up or hide the infrastructure of the band’s instruments or our film gear, we embrace that chaos, but we also wanted to play with our audiences expectations to land somewhere in the middle of narrative and performance. Visually, I wanted to represent the struggle I heard in the lyrics in a physical way. How we fight these feelings, how we try to beat them down, or free ourselves from them. These feelings get inside us, under our skin – ridding ourselves of them, or exorcising them from within, becomes a kind of exercise in healing.”