INTRODUCING: Press Club

PRESS CLUB have been making music together for over twelve years, but 2022 is undoubtedly the most exciting year of their career so far. On the back of releasing their third studio album Endless Motion, Melbourne-based PRESS CLUB are rapidly gaining traction, and this attention can be attributed to three things: constant touring and festival appearances, radio play, and hard work. With this album expected to be their most successful yet, now is the best time to tune in. As we sit down with drummer Frank Lees, he explains, “we’re super excited. We’re just happy to get it out and see what it’s like out there in the world. The response has been great, but even if it wasn’t we’d be happy. Having written the album that we did, it’s a massive process.”

To really understand how PRESS CLUB got to this point, we have to go back to the beginning, and Frank is happy to fill in the gaps. He says, “we all met each other at the end of the 2010s, and we were all playing in different kinds of bands. We found ourselves questioning what kind of music we wanted to make, so we thought, ‘let’s have a crack at something else.’ That’s how our first album came out. It was just us, experimenting, trying to develop a sound that was uniquely us that we loved.”

Because each member had already been in bands and found various problems, they knew things with this band had to be different. “The aim was to just make music together. We’d all been doing the industry thing, trying to get played on the radio, and we hated it. I think it reflected in the song writing, like we’d write these songs and we weren’t really into them as individuals, hoping that something would happen and that we’d ‘make it’ as a band. PRESS CLUB just began as a passion project and we didn’t care about any of the shit. We just said if we’re going to exist in the music industry, we want it to be on our terms, making the music that we love. That was the ethos of PRESS CLUB from the very beginning.”

From then to now, PRESS CLUB have come a long way, and this album has been in the works for a long time. Frank explains, “we’d been writing it for over four years. A portion was written on the road and a large portion was written in lockdown. That was an interesting thing, up until that point we’d been used to writing songs in a room together, coming up with ideas and spit-balling it, whereas with Endless Motion we had to write on our own and pass the project files around. I came up with a filing system so we could track where each song was up to, and It felt quite rigid but it was actually really freeing in terms of letting us be creative in certain guidelines. We could do whatever we wanted and know that we could fall back on this system.”

Lockdown impacted almost every musician in a different way, but it wasn’t always negative, and this different way of doing things seemed to work well for the band. When it got to actually recording the album though, everything was a lot less strict, and they recorded it entirely in only six days. “We’ve always recorded the albums in a small amount of time. We do so much work in the lead up that once we get it into the studio, all we want to do is capture how the band sounds at that particular time. What we get from that experience is to have a really live, gritty kind of energy to the music that you don’t get when you’re really analytical.”

The album’s title, Endless Motion, sums up everything the band were feeling when writing it. “When we were in lockdown we felt like all we had to do was just keep making music in order to keep this band alive, and now it’s like everything’s back and everything’s 100% on all of the time, and there’s no real rest. You kind of have to lean into this feeling of Endless Motion. Despite everything, this horrible weather event in Australia (the wildfires) and despite the pandemic, we’re going to keep pushing through.” This also sum’s up their plans for the future, and Frank explains. “After that intense energy that we put into the first couple of albums, we were all feeling a bit burnt out and we were all questioning whether or not we actually wanted to keep doing this thing. Not to the point where we were considering breaking up, but to the point where we were asking why we were doing this. Then, that imposed break we had during 2020 forced us to really answer that question. We’re going to keep doing this forever.” With this kind of ideology, it’s easier in principal than it is in practice, but the band do have ways of dealing with its consequences. “I don’t think all four of us are on all of the time. We’re just open to stepping up when other people feel like they’re a bit burnt out. I know that if I ever feel like I can’t do something some of the others will pick up the slack.”

If you want to get into PRESS CLUB, Frank says their song Suburbia is a good start. “That album [2018’s Late Teens] was our band’s introduction to the world, it still connects with audiences today. This new album is more of an evolution from that sound, and it’s us really putting a lot of thought into song writing, and trying to say something, and sort of developing as people as well as evolving as a band.”

Endless Motion is out now via Hassle Records.

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