The anticipation of Teenage Dads' sophomore album was palpable on Tuesday afternoon, even though it couldn't be seen or heard. The indie-rock sweethearts were on the verge of releasing a new album and had already plunged into an extensive tour. While some might feel like they were in a pressure cooker under such circumstances, for Angus, Vincent, Jordan, and Connor, it was nothing.

The boys were knee-deep in merch, which either had been signed or needed to be. In between discussing their previous work and accidentally drawing on each other with Sharpie pens, they were deliberating just how structurally sound a stack of CDs would be for supporting the weight of a phone. On this phone was me, negotiating the candied chaos along with various technical issues from both ends of the line. 

Drummer Vincent Kinna and bassist Angus Christie were mostly speaking, and from what I could spy in the background, guitarist Connor McLaughlin and vocalist Jordan Finlay were around, tending to the merch business. It was mayhem, mellowed out by Angus and Vincent’s warmth and easygoingness.

The gravitational theme of our conversation was the band’s sophomore album, Majordomo. The album arrives six years after their debut LP Potpourri Lake, and only seven years after their first show in 2017. Originally from the Mornington Peninsula, the band came together in high school. From music rooms to house parties, local gigs around Melbourne, and touring with Lime Cordiale, their upward trajectory has been crystal clear.

Despite their coastal origins, Teenage Dads are not a surf-rock band. In fact, they decline the stereotype and wear the indie-rock name badge proudly: “None of us surf and none of us feel like our music is very surfy”. Taking notes from fellow indie-rock notables like Phoenix and The Strokes, it isn’t difficult to hear the parallels, particularly when it comes to their hooky guitars and complex synth lines. 

Exploring the discography of their four EPs and two LPs, it becomes apparent that no reference is off limits: friendship, children’s TV shows, relationship woes, and pirates are just a handful of themes that contribute to a sonic library that is at once unique, sentimental and quotidian. Their fanbase lovingly aligns with this insouciance. I too felt it acutely throughout our conversation. 

AMELIA SZABO Thank you so much for speaking with me today. There are so many exciting things coming up for you, so I'm really glad we got the chance to talk. Where are you guys right now? 

VINCENT KANNA We are at Jordan's parents house signing all of our vinyl and CDs. 

ANGUS CHRISTIE Six trillion different pieces of things.

AS How does it feel to be right on the cusp of such a busy few months ahead? 

AC Relieving. It's been great. 

VK Yeah, it feels good. I think we're getting really excited for this Australian tour. It still hasn't really sunk in that we're playing some of these rooms, so I think we're just trying to enjoy chilling out at home for the moment.

AS And you've recently been in Europe and you're about to head off all over the world, do you feel an energy shift from the audience when you're going from place to place? 

VK I feel like yes and no. Germany, particularly, is probably the most different or non-English speaking countries. I feel like you have to win them over just a little more. But everyone still has a good time. I was under the impression that American audiences were hard to win over, but they've actually been really, really good. 

AS Indie-rock is so at the forefront of the Australian music scene. How mindful are you of your predecessors and the current artists when you're writing? How do you set yourselves apart?

VK My personal thought is I hope that we don't get lumped into surf-rock. None of us surf and none of us feel like our music is very surfy, so I feel like we're more conscious of that.

Other than that, I feel like a lot of our influences are probably overseas, indie-rock bands.  But there's still lots of really good current indie-rock, like our friends Moving Stills we think are really fun.

AS So more influenced by, as opposed to trying to set yourselves apart from them.  

VK Yeah. It's not like we're trying to not be Australian, but I feel like we look to fans that we like and have found that a lot of them are from the U.S. or the U.K. and take inspiration and that creates some hope that we are a little different from the other music in Australia. 

AS So there's been six years in between the debut album and the sophomore album with the EPs in between, which is quite a unique trajectory in terms of releases. Did that come about organically or was that a purposeful decision that you guys made as a band? 

AC It was a purposeful decision to do the EPs, because we signed to our record label in the middle of it all, so you have to kind of start again. Once you start releasing albums, it feels like you just have to keep releasing albums, so you almost feel like you have to start anew with building your audience before you then launch into an album cycle because otherwise you don't feel like you're ready yet. 

VK EPs are a good time to explore some sounds as well and it's our first time getting another creative's involvement. We had Steven Schram mix those first two EPs—I should say, first two EPs with our label. Basically put it this way, in our manager's eyes, this Majordomo album is our debut album.  But to us and maybe some fans this is our second album.  But, this definitely feels a lot more like an album than our first one because back then we were just, we were just doing everything ourselves. We weren't really strategic a whole lot, like a little, but we wrote music and we wanted to put it out as fast as possible.

AC There wasn't any really filtering process of  music that went out and what didn't.

VK But, a few things have changed and I'm kind of glad that we took the time. 

AS Did you find that you took things away from ‘starting again’, that maybe if you hadn't taken that time, you wouldn't have been able to create the album that's coming out in just a few days? 

AC Yeah, absolutely. We've all definitely evolved as musicians and as songwriters and the whole songwriting process has kind of morphed into a different sort of process now and in a lot of ways we've evolved. So it's very different to what it would have been back then and I don't think we would have gotten anywhere near a similar product. 

AS You’ve said that your last EP Midnight Driving is about a new perspective and a different point of view. How do you view your earlier work now? Is there anything you look back on and wish you could tweak or is it just positive? 

VK Yeah, I think it's a cool perspective that I feel like a lot of musicians share, not everybody, but it's a nice reminder to think the music of that time or from a certain time is reflective of you in that time. I feel like it's a bit of a comforting thought.  So I feel like, it's really nice to look back to a lot of those songs from our early days, but just be happy and proud of us going there and doing it ourselves.

AC I generally think of it the same way I do a lot of things in life. Even if there's stuff that you kind of regret or that you would change, you wouldn't be in the same position  that you are now if you went back and changed things. It doesn't really make sense to, in the grander scheme of things, to try and go back and  change things that have happened in the past.

AS And with Majordomo, how does it compare to your previous work both thematically and sonically? 

VK I feel like the themes are pretty similar and more or less just an extension of themes that Jordy sung about on the last two EPs. It's just all about us going through life as twenty something year olds and experiencing things in the moment. Sonically speaking, I feel like the album is still kind of what people think Teenage Dads is and sounds like. This isn't going to come to them as a complete shock, but I think it feels a lot more consolidated and thought-out.

AC It feels like a level up to us. Maybe people have generated an idea of what we are and what we sound like. It feels like it consolidates it all, but then just lifts itself up to a more grand scale. 

VK The fact that we have a song on there that's about pirates is a nod to our personality and we take our project very seriously, but also we want to have as much fun with it as we can and that's been reflected in our early music too.

AS Did it feel like a level up when you were in the studio writing and recording? Or was it more when you listened back, that you had that clear comparison.

VK I feel like both.

AC Yeah, being in the studio it is very nice with a lot of songwriting things having limitations and it feels like you can always be more creative with limitations. But being in the studio this time with so many endless tools around that we had at our disposal,  I felt like at those moments it was very freeing. It doesn't feel like there was anything holding us back from releasing or creating the best possible music we could.

AS You have already released a few singles from the upcoming album. Can you talk me through the process of selecting those singles and the rollout for them?  

VK So with this album, it wasn't like we wrote the entire album and then picked the songs out. I think that's something we'd love to do down the line, but the way the industry works, it’s not really tactical at the moment.

But the first song that we released was 'Speedracer'. And when we wrote that, at the time, I don't even think our EP Midnight Driving had been announced. So it was quite early on.  And while we didn't go into the studio with a mind of starting an album, 'Speedracer' gave us a bit of a direction on where we'd want to take the next release. 

I think that was an important song and then that led us to another session where we wrote a few more songs and then they ended up being the subsequent songs that we put out. It just kind of continued on this path until maybe a year later, we had all these demos and it felt like it was forming an album and we’re like okay cool, we've got the direction, we know the process that we like now through a lot of trial and error, let's go finish the album and so we did that over summer.  

AS So you do think that all the singles nicely encapsulate the sound of the album? 

AC Yeah, I think so. You want to give just a snapshot of what you can expect but also not give all of it so that there's still plenty to be desired.

AS You've just been announced on the Beyond The Valley lineup. How do festival shows differ from a tour show for you? 

AC Festival shows, honestly, still feel pretty fresh to us. With our headline shows, you bring it to different people every night, but they're within your audience already. With festivals, it is very exciting. The concept of no one knowing who we are at this show feels like a little burst of energy to try and win over potential fans that haven't seen you before or haven't really heard of you yet.