2016 has seen Sydney’s Bag Raiders rise into the spotlight again.
Following the release of their latest EP, Waterfalls, they are currently touring in the US. Soon, the electro duo will head back Down Under for a club tour over summer. Plus, they’ve just released a brand new single, ‘Beat Me To The Punch’, featuring Mayer Hawthorne.
Typically unafraid to test out material on the road, Jack Glass and Chris Stracey have been dropping the new track in their current run of DJ sets, and they’re pretty happy with the reaction so far.
“It’s been going good,” says Stracey. “People have been really positive so far. That’s the other thing about making music and playing DJ gigs as well as live gigs, is that you get to play new music to test it out even before it’s released.”
One of the key reasons why Bag Raiders find it useful to put new material in front of an audience is that it allows them to tweak their tracks based on the immediate feedback.
“I was saying this to Jack the other day at a festival – playing things out, you just get a better idea about it,” Stracey says. “Especially if you’ve been thinking, ‘Should we go this way?’ on a certain track – there’s that kind of environment where you just know if it’s going well. Say if you’re playing a song and there’s a section in it that you’re a bit unsure about, you know already before you get to it how it’s going to go in that environment you’re in. You can get to a part and go, ‘No, that’s wrong,’ and it’s mostly to do with structure.”
As for where ‘Beat Me To The Punch’ fits in with Bag Raiders’ wider, somewhat disjointed discography, Stracey confirms it’s the first taste of what will be their long-awaited second full-length album.
“It’s definitely part of something bigger. There’s a lot of music that we’ve got waiting to see the light of day. So that’s going to be a full-length record, and we’re still just waiting on the right moment. But I’d say hopefully early next year sometime there’ll be a full record.”
It’s a bit of a shock to think that Bag Raiders are only just readying themselves for a second LP release after ten years in the game, especially since there’s been no shortage of new music over the years via plenty of singles and EPs. Stracey says the reason behind the wait has been combination of things like changing labels and not wanting to end up with a backlog of songs that no longer felt current by the time they were released as a whole project.
“Well, it’s been a bit circumstantial as well as us intentionally not releasing another full-length album. There’s been all this confusion about where we’ve been, record label-wise. We got moved around a bit, so we’ve had a lot of music that we’ve been working on and we just weren’t really ready. It seemed like when we were doing the record, things kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed, and as you can imagine, if you’ve got music that you’ve been sitting on, you just want it out there because it can grow stale on you.
“So whilst we weren’t ready to release the next album, we thought, ‘Well, we’ve got all this music and we’re making new music all the time, so let’s start releasing music.’ So we started to release music via EPs and kept working on new music, so that by the time it comes to finally releasing a full-length, it’s really something that feels current to us, and honest to us, and it’s where we are in time. We also felt like looking back on that first album, it’s not the kind of album we’d make now.”
Bag Raiders have forged an impressive career over the past decade, and for Stracey the will to keep going comes down to a love of music and a desire to satisfy the fans new and old.
“I feel really lucky that we’ve worked really well together and that we’ve had this thing going for so long, and we’re still able to go and do shows,” he says. “We still get new fans from new stuff we’re releasing, and then have people turn up to shows and tell us they’ve been listening from when they were young. We had someone turn up the other day and they were like, ‘I lost my virginity to your record!’ That is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say that – it was awesome,” he laughs.
Stracey and Glass are also passionate about ensuring that up-and-coming musicians had the same opportunities as they did to cut their teeth on the Sydney club scene. That’s why they lent their names to a campaign created by Keep Sydney Open to place plaques outside venues that have closed since the advent of Sydney’s lockout laws.
“To be honest, if those sorts of venues that have closed weren’t operating back when we were young, I don’t know what we would have done,” says Stracey. “Our careers were born at four in the morning; that was vital to us being able to do what we did. It was the place that a lot of our really good friends who make music really came into their own in those parties and club nights. It’s such an important part of a city’s culture, really, especially for someone who is young.”
Waterfalls isout now through Universal. Bag Raiders play atChinese Laundry onSaturday December 10,Manly Wharf Hotel onSunday January 1,Beach Road Hotel onWednesday January 4, and also at Coogee Bay Hotel on Saturday December 31.
