Being an indie band in Australia usually follows a similar trajectory: You and mates decide to make a band, you rehearse a 30 minute set with songs you wrote or cover.

You play that same 30 minute set for the next few months until you write another series of songs and the cycle continues until you either hit it big on the radio with that one song you recorded or someone sees you and likes you enough to sign you.

For the members of DMA’s, they’d lived that life and wanted to go another way.

“We had been playing in so many bands before. We realised it can only get you so far. We’d been in bands where you go ‘alright we’ve got eight songs now, lets start gigging’. But the truth is that only two or three of them are actually good songs, your mates come to the first three times you play then they get bored, and the band is bored because there’s no new songs being made,” said lead guitarist Johnny Took.

“We’ve fucking done that. Why go through that again. We spent the next three or four years just writing and recording and improving as much as possible.”

Those three or four years gestated the songs that appear on DMA’s debut Hills End, a beautifully written rock album, sounding both familiar but managing to discover new sonic territories. Singer Tommy O’Dell croons his yearning voice over the blistering guitar work of Johnny Took and Matt Mason (who also sings backing).

The album is filled with songs that echo the apathetic despondency of late ’90s and early ’00s rock music but the beauty of the DMA’s is the stratum of their influences. Particularly their acknowledgment of Australia’s Golden Age of Rock.

“We are big Paul Kelly fans, The Go-Betweens, The Bluebottle Kiss. Eighties, early nineties stuff” said Matt Mason showing off amongst his numerous tattoos two scrawls on his left forearm saying ‘PAUL KELLY’.

“I think when Tommy comes and sings over the top of the guitar part it makes it instantly sound British.”

The biggest comparison the band gets is to the Britpop sound particularly the band Oasis;

“There’s a lot of similarities. They do say ‘it’s Oasis’, problem is they only say that. There’s a lot more in that,” explained Mason.

Once DMA’s dropped their single ‘Delete’, the Oasis comparisons brought the band an international fanbase. Once signed with boutique label I Oh You, the band had the opportunity to rub shoulders with some amazing engineers and producers.

“We have had the opportunity to work with different people, mixing engineers producers stuff like that. We met up with Jim Abbiss who worked on the first Arctic Monkeys record, he was potentially going to engineer the record. We kind of got excited about it at the time, but kind of realized that we preferred having our own control,” said Johnny Took with a note of pride.

Love of production and home recordings is what brought Johnny Took and Tommy O’Dell together to start DMA’s with Matt Mason following. All the band members were consistent musicians in Sydney’s inner-west, when Johnny Took started learning sound engineering.

“I kind of slowly got into sound production when I was twenty, and I was playing in a band with Tommy at that time. He’d never heard his voice recorded before. He was dropping something around my house at one time, and literally I was in the middle of recording a song doing a vocal take, and he asked if he could record on it,” Took reflects his broad Ocker voice getting slightly tender with memory.

“Since then, we both fell in love with production, and I fell in love with his voice.”

Hills End, after the initial flirting with using an external engineer and producer, was therefore made D.I.Y, a recurring feature of DMA’s musical journey which for Took was never going to be any different.

“We’ve always been into production and home recordings, so we knew it was always going to be like that.”

“We see a lot of bands that go away and write for two weeks then record the album, or even write in the studio. But we have years [of work] so we don’t have to rush,” Matt Mason said.

“The liberty of the debut album is you have a lot of songs to pick from a pretty long period of time. For the next record though we’ll have to sit down and write a couple [of songs],” he says.

It may seem early to talk of the second record, but DMA’s look like it may not be far off.

“We could start recording a second record, I think we’ll be recording a lot of it on the road, we brought portable recording equipment. So after like sound check we could do a drum take or guitar work” Matt explains.

We turn to the DMA’s songwriting. DMA’s are an oddity in the Australian music scene not because they have a weird concept, dress differently, or make statements. They are just musicians making music. They’re the antithesis of the highly stylised niche or gimmick-driven musicians that populate the airwaves.

“It’s not rocket science, we are not writing music to create a new genre”

“It’s not rocket science, we are not writing music to create a new genre” said Took. “For me personally, music is more emotional. If music makes me feel something and I connect with it that’s the kind of stuff I like.”

“I grew up with a lot of Springsteen. I wanted to go back to principles of good songwriting. Good lyrics, honest tunes. You hear lots of DMA’s tunes they can be played on an acoustic guitar as just as a song song instead of being purely production.”

Working from the song’s purity to then blossoming the ideas into its own emotional microcosm has become the band’s defining characteristic.

“It felt like focusing purely on the songwriting and production got us there quicker than slogging it out there on the road,” Mason concludes.

The elephantine gestation of DMA’s was no secret to their friends and acquaintances, who were early consumers of the DMA’s brand of pure songwriting.

“Back in the day, when we first started writing those tunes, we used to have lock-ins at the Annandale Hotel. We used to play the tunes over the PA just with our mates. But that was still two and half years before we started playing live.”

Playing live is something the DMA’s avoided, for no reason other than giving their attention to the recorded outcome.

We only started playing live because Johann [Ponniah] from I Oh You wanted to make sure that Tommy could sing,” said Took.

This first official show held at the Annandale, which had early DMA’s tunes already implanted into its brickwork, ended up being one of the last for the iconic Sydney venue before it was bought by the Oscars Hotel Group in late 2013. “I think we were the last band that played at the Annandale. It was for about five people” says Took.

[include_post id=”471624″] Discussions on the Annandale and its change of ownership move to the situation of Sydney’s live music scene what with ‘Casino’ Mike Baird’s turning the already sour fortunes of many live venues to putrid expectations. The infamous lock-out laws, introduced by former Premier of New South Wales Barry O’Farrell and heavily adfended by Mike Baird has been the cause of so much upset in the live music community. For DMA’s although they have been absent from Sydney, they are noticing how it is hurting their community.

“We haven’t really gone out. I read a lot about it. It is really terrible. It hasn’t affected us that much because we’ve been touring,” said Mason.

“[Other bands say] it’s harder to find venues to do gigs, lots of venues are closing. In the Inner-West people go out on Friday Saturday night to cause trouble like they used to in the Cross. It’s just shifted,” Matt Mason pauses then finishes with “there’s a lot more dickheads walking around.”

Johnny Took adds his sadness about Sydney’s desolate nightlife, “It is sad hearing about it, when you have been away a lot. And then you see so many amazing cities that are doing it cool. You come home and it’s dead.”

Being away from Australia means their return shows have been a welcome reintroduction to the band’s catalogue, which has expanded rapidly with more releases since their EP.

“We hadn’t played a gig in Australia since releasing ‘Lay Down’. That’s the problem with an EP. People only know four songs. So you have tunes you think people will like but you have to push through it. Now we’ve released more songs so you see people singing along,” said Took.

But for their upcoming international tour they are playing the UK, “The UK is consistent, as is Australia,” but it’s the challenging territory of the United States that will be the hurdle for DMA’s.

“The US has been kind of slow for us. However we have been picked up by a couple of college radio stations so when we’re back it’ll probably be good for us,” said Johnny Took.

“We did a gig in Chicago and we counted twelve people, but then we played in Columbus, Ohio to about two-hundred and fifty.”

Judging by the strength of the album it may be more likely they receive two-hundred and fifty at their shows. It is clear that no matter whom their audience is, DMA’s are going to keep creating and releasing music. Even if it means they do perform for only twelve, those twelve will have an amazing time.

DMA’s new album Hills End is out the Friday 26th February 2016 through I OH YOU.

DMA’S NATIONAL TOUR DATES

Friday, 27th May 2016
The Zoo, Brisbane

Saturday, 28th May 2016
Big Pineapple Festival, Sunshine Coast

Friday, 3rd June 2016
Fat Controller, Adelaide

Saturday, 4th June 2016
The Rosemount, Perth

Friday, 10th June 2016
The Metro, Sydney

Saturday, 11th June 2016
The Corner, Melbourne

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