{"id":243844,"date":"2025-10-22T15:38:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T15:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/243844\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T15:38:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T15:38:08","slug":"indie-rising-stars-the-belair-lip-bombs-we-dont-want-to-regret-not-giving-it-a-proper-crack-australian-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/243844\/","title":{"rendered":"Indie rising stars the Belair Lip Bombs: \u2018We don\u2019t want to regret not giving it a proper crack\u2019 | Australian music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Again, one of the year\u2019s best indie rock albums, comes courtesy of the Belair Lip Bombs, a Melbourne four-piece who write with a precision and attention to melody that could put hired-gun pop songwriters to shame. Their second album, following their 2023 debut Lush Life, Again looks set to establish the Lip Bombs \u2013 guitarist and vocalist Maisie Everett, bass player Jimmy Droughton, drummer Daniel Devlin and guitarist Mike Bradvica \u2013 as rising stars in Australia and far beyond. It\u2019s the band\u2019s first album for Jack White\u2019s Third Man Records<\/a> \u2013 Lush Life, released by the Frankston label Cousin Will, was reissued by Third Man last year \u2013 and the band are appreciative of this new, larger platform.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s cool being part of a record release where people are going to hear it, whereas I think with the last record, [we] put it out without any expectations,\u201d says Devlin, on a video call with Everett from Toronto, where the band are in the middle of a North American tour supporting Spacey Jane<\/a>. \u201cAnd sonically, we\u2019ve pushed the sound into different directions, which is fun for us. It\u2019ll be cool to see the response to that as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The Belair Lip Bombs hail from Frankston, a suburb of Melbourne<\/a> situated on the Mornington Peninsula, and cut their teeth playing at Singing Bird Studios, an all-ages venue and recording space around which a small, tight-knit community of bands has emerged. The band recorded their first two EPs \u2013 which were noisier and looser than either of their albums \u2013 there, and still see it as a vital community resource. \u201cYou kind of had to move to Melbourne if you wanted to play, so it\u2019s great that something like Singing Bird existed for us,\u201d Devlin says. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty important for new bands that are coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The leap the band made between 2019\u2019s Songs To Do Your Laundry To and Lush Life is remarkable \u2013 the songs became punchier and more driving; and Everett\u2019s lyrics became more acerbic and deeply memorable, a quality she hones further on Again.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the first two EPs to Lush Life, I was growing up a bit \u2013 transitioning from being a teenager to being in our 20s, people in the band were getting into relationships and going through breakups, and we all did a lot of travelling,\u201d Everett says. \u201cI moved to Melbourne when I was 19, and living there got us a bit more connected with the scene, and probably helped us as a band in the early days.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Belair Lip Bombs are an Australian indie rock band formed in Frankston, Victoria in 2017. Photograph: Bridie Fitzgerald<\/p>\n

The Belair Lip Bombs stand out in the Melbourne scene, if only because their sound \u2013 sharp, clean and direct as it is \u2013 is a far cry from the post-punk or art rock that many of the bands in the city tend to play. \u201cThe Melbourne sound or whatever, I wasn\u2019t really introduced to it until I was in my early 20s,\u201d Everett says.<\/p>\n

Her formative songwriting influences were more \u201ccrap pop-punk music from America\u201d \u2013 which she says she struggles to listen to now \u2013 and classic 90s bands like Pavement. Devlin says the crossover among the four band members tends to be music from \u201cwhen indie rock was in the charts in the mid-2000s\u201d.<\/p>\n

The band connected with Third Man at South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in 2024, and were struck by the fact that the label was \u201creally passionate and cared about the songs,\u201d Devlin says \u2013 as opposed to \u201cother labels we\u2019ve met, where they [only] see the streaming numbers or the marketability of a band.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having an international label removes one of the many barriers that Australian bands tend to face when breaking overseas. \u201cFor me, at least, it\u2019s always been my ambition to turn this into a career,\u201d Everett says. \u201cThat\u2019s probably been the driving factor from the start.\u201d<\/p>\n

The band still all hold down jobs in Melbourne; Devlin says that he and, Droughton and Bradvica \u201clove having a balance\u201d between the band and everyday life, but \u201csomething shifted with the Third Man stuff and the new record \u2013 we\u2019ve all got a bit more ambitious and more invested, and we want to give it as much of a shot as possible, because we don\u2019t want to regret not giving it a proper crack\u201d.<\/p>\n

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You can\u2019t really trust the opinions of your bandmates when you\u2019re all fucking stuck in a room for 12 hours a dayMaisie Everett<\/p>\n

Everett says the band \u201cspent years writing songs\u201d ahead of Lush Life, in contrast to Again, where a lot more time was spent working out songs, restructuring and redefining them, in the studio. Even so, the songs on Again feel even more clarified, evidenced by the deft intensity of tracks like Again and Again and Price of a Man. Working with Joe White, from Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever<\/a>, \u201chelped us tighten all the screws\u201d, Everett says.<\/p>\n

Devlin adds: \u201cIt was just nice having him in the room to support us \u2013 to build a bit of confidence in the band. When you\u2019re trying to write a record that you know is coming out on a label for the first time, it was a little bit stressful \u2013 so it was nice having someone else there that could ease the pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everett says: \u201cYou can\u2019t really trust the opinions of your bandmates when you\u2019re all fucking stuck in a room for 12 hours a day, right? Having a fifth person there to round everything out really helps.\u201d<\/p>\n

As so many other rising Australian bands have done before them, do they plan to move overseas now? \u201cSpacey Jane, they all live in LA or whatever \u2013 it\u2019s like, is that the only way? I don\u2019t know,\u201d Everett says. \u201cWe\u2019ve been living in Melbourne so far \u2026 and everything\u2019s sort of worked out!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Again, one of the year\u2019s best indie rock albums, comes courtesy of the Belair Lip Bombs, a Melbourne…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-243844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}