Frenzal Rhomb are an Australian musical institution.
Brash, outspoken, confident, flippant, but most of all entertaining, Frenzal Rhomb have been plying their brand of punk rock since the early 1990s and throughout their whole existence have not given one solitary fuck about convention and/or conformity.
In fact quite the opposite.
“There’s no these songs have to go on because of these lyrics or whatever. It’s more whatever got the most votes and in this instance the songs with the most swearing that we’ve ever done happened to get on there.”
Jason Whalley
The band have made almost as many enemies as they have friends along the way, but the fact the Sydney upstarts have just released their 10th studio album The Cup Of Pestilence is all the musical vindication Frenzal Rhomb needs.
Not that they would give two shits about vindication. Or acceptance. Or adulation.
Frenzal Rhomb are simply happy being Frenzal Rhomb and for that they must be saluted.
Even the fact that it has been six years since their last album Hi Vis High Tea proclaimed the eternal rebirth of the band doesn’t seem to faze the quartet who have never been known – or expected for that matter – to fall into company line.
Has it been worth the wait?
My oath it has, and even more worth it was the chance to sit down for a bit of banter with the irrepressible vocalist for Frenzal Rhomb, Jason Whalley.
“It took a bit too long, but we’ve finally made it,” he offered, without a hint of apology.
Six years for any band is a long time between drinks, so we ask Whalley what Frenzal Rhomb have learned about themselves and their music since their last public musical venture.
“I’ve learned that I’m not very patient,” he laughed. “We were ready to go in 2020, we were booked to go back over to Colorado with Phil Stevenson and record it, but it turns out that the world had other ideas, and so we couldn’t go. We rebooked it for the next year and then the next and then finally we got to do it.”
Ever the type to push buttons we ask why the band had to wait and go to America to record the new album rather than complete the process at home.
“That’s what everyone says,” he sighed, “but it wouldn’t have sounded as good. Sorry Australia… Nah, I’m sure we could have done that but after doing the last two records over there we just felt the production was so good and when we did that Smoko record in 2011 – which is the first time that we went to The Blasting Room – it was a bit of a step-up for us production wise. We thought man, is it going to be something that’s almost as good, but not quite as good? The guys over there, for them, it’s their kind of music, the fast melodic punk stuff, so it was sort of a no-brainer. And we thought no-ones really screaming down the phone at us going ‘when’s the next Frenzal Rhomb record?’ We don’t have the record company breathing down our necks or anything, so we thought we would wait. In a way it’s a different record to what it would have been because we ended up keeping on writing and demoing between then and now, and I think it turned out pretty good. We ended up demoing close to 60 songs in the end, and most of them were terrible, but there was a lot, whereas if we recorded it two years ago then we might have only had 40 songs.”
In the full interview Jason talks more about the recording process, how the band settled on the final album tracks, the musical direction of The Cup Of Pestilence, their love of the C word and the increasing negativity towards the word, the meaning behind a few of the songs, the upcoming tour, Frenzal Rhomb’s longevity, his three commandments of punk and more.
