Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever were gearing up to drop their highly anticipated sophomore album, Sideways to New Italy, when the global pandemic forced them, like almost every other artist, off the road. And, as lead guitarist Joe White recounts the feeling of getting close to truly ushering their latest batch of songs into the world onstage—only to have those plans derailed—a profound sense of loss is palpable. 

“I genuinely was grieving,” White says of the tunes that comprise their second record, which was released in June on Sub Pop. “I didn’t really realize it until months after we were shut down. It drove me mad. I took it out on my tennis racket.” 

Based in Melbourne, Australia, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever officially formed in 2013, but the project’s seeds were actually planted years earlier when White spent time in smaller bands with Rolling Blackouts vocalist/ acoustic guitarist Fran Keaney and the group’s third guitarist Tom Russo. (They all played different instruments in those earlier groups.) Eventually, all three musicians moved to guitar and they added Tom’s brother Joe on bass and drummer Marcel Tussie, solidifying Rolling Blackouts’ lineup. The combo’s sound immediately became bigger and more frenetic; their early recordings quickly drew comparisons to influential Australian indie-rockers The Go-Betweens. 

The band’s first album, 2018’s Hope Downs, showed promise, proving that they could write peppy, yet powerful, rock songs. And, despite their three-guitar lineup, there was still plenty of room for everyone to shine.

“The acoustic was always the rhythmic thing, so it was out of the way. Tom’s guitar playing is totally different— there’s a jaggedness—and mine is more expansive,” White explains. He vividly recalls a gig with Parquet Courts and Beach Fossils during the band’s first trip Manchester, England, where Rolling Blackouts found themselves playing in front of 1,000 fans, many of whom were surprisingly familiar with their catalog. 

“There was a bit of groundswell in the U.K., but it was our first time there—and we hadn’t seen it. We were like, ‘Oh, shit, this is actually real. This is something,’” Keaney says.

After touring behind the songs from Hope Downs, the quintet started work on the material that would grow into Sideways to New Italy. The musicians retained their jangly, British dream-pop, indie aesthetic. But, this time, the resulting tunes turned out to be a bit more atmospheric, especially “Beautiful Steven”— which blends some desertsounding guitar riffs with a ‘60s Kinks-ian vibe—and the dark, urgent, bass-centric “Cars in Space.” On “Cameo,” the band experiments with tempos and euphoria, as the chorus screams, “You take a high wire jump/ You feel time dripping away.”

“The songs are full of these existential crises. We really wanted to capture the intuition of our earlier songs as well as [the purity of ] our early mistakes—we wanted to bottle that,” Keaney says of the Rolling Blackouts’ recording process. “We consciously underwrote a lot of the ideas, so we were bringing a very rudimentary idea to the band and then exploding it—pulling it apart and putting it back together again. In hindsight, that was a time-intensive way of doing it. Taking the rudimentary ideas and blowing them up—it was very intense.” 

White echoes that sentiment. “We were trying to capture that chemistry that helps create the songs. And it’s hard to force that. What we got was a record that could have sounded like a set of straightforward pop songs. But it became its own weird thing.”

Even before Australia started to open up after successfully combatting a second wave of the novel coronavirus, the band members started working on some new material remotely. “Fran and I made some music on the computer—and Marcel came over and record some drums. ‘Cutting and pasting’ writing is very strange. But it yielded some really interesting results,” White says.

In certain ways, being forced to record in isolation has been the ultimate existential crisis for a group that relishes performing live. Yet, they’ve still made it work.

“It’s not underwriting; it’s writing all the way,” adds Keaney. “That’s one thing I’m pivoting to this time around: Finish the song, put a bow on it, park it and move on to the next one.” 

And Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are looking at the challenges their currently facing as a test—both of the relationships that they’ve cultivated over the years and of their proven creative process. The group members clearly click and want to continue clicking, but they also know that their recent success could be fleeting. “If we want to do this, we have to work for it,” Keaney says. “There’s not a moment where we’ve thought, ‘We’ve made it.’ For better or worse, that’s not a reality for us.