Safia aren’t the next big thing in music, they’re already a big thing.
With their host of awards and sales milestones, the band are already one of Australia’s most exciting and profitable acts, and they’ve got an APRA award and a two times platinum-selling single to prove it. Now, with a mere week until their debut album Internal lands and a month until they embark on another national tour, the speeding bullet that is Safia just keeps picking up speed.
“I’m super excited!” frontman Ben Woolner enthuses. “We’ve been kind of waiting in limbo for a while. I’ve listened to the album so many times. I think I just need it to be out now. Some of the tracks are incarnations of some of the very first few songs that we put out as Safia, so it’s just been about finding the to time to put them together and make the record one cohesive body of work.
“We’re always just writing for fun. We write subconsciously, rather than specifically for a record. That said, I think when we sat down and looked at these tracks, there was some kind of narrative within them, even though they weren’t written with an album in mind. And then we went from there.”
Having met in primary school, the trio that make up Safia – Woolner, Michael Bell and Harry Sayers – have spent years fantasising about releasing an album of their own material. They started off playing covers of their favourite bands, groups like Guns N’ Roses and The Beatles, until they burst into the Australian-electro scene a few years back. The new record was recorded in their hometown, Canberra, and penned and self-produced by the three-piece before being eventually mixed by Eric J Dubowsky, the mastermind-mixer who has worked with Flume, Flight Facilities and Chet Faker.
“Most of our writing is done at home,” Woolner says. “Two of the songs were done in London, but that was during a week in the studio. Predominantly it was all done at home in the same set-up as when we first started, because that’s the place where we feel the most comfortable. We tried a lot of things and spent slabs of time in a studio. It was about finding out how we write best when we have to work on more than one song at a time. We’re definitely comfortable and more relaxed and kind of free back home, here in Canberra.”
The band have made their way onto millions of playlists (literally: they have over 20 million online streams) after being highly promoted by triple j, placing in the station’s annual Hottest 100 for three consecutive years. But despite this amazing feat, they’d prefer not to be pigeonholed as just another triple j artist.
“We’re sort of in that electronic kind of triple j circle, but then again we’re also not,” Woolner says. “We’re usually kind of pinned as our own thing, or as something kind of outside of the box, so we wanted this album to be a true representation of the three of us. We wanted no other hands involved and just to provide the best body of work that we could provide at that period of time.
“We’re influenced by anything around us,” Woolner continues. “There’s no specific thing we go into the studio wanting to be like. In fact we try to actively avoid writing a song after hearing something that pricks up our ears. I think a lot of the songs on the album were kind of inspired almost more by a visual aesthetic: inspired by movies and soundtracks.”
Though Woolner and his bandmates have never pretended to be movie buffs, they certainly do draw a range of influences from the films they watch, and the new record contains a number of clear touchstones. “We wrote ‘Bye Bye’ after watching the Sherlock Homes movie with Robert Downey Jr., which had a quirky aesthetic,” Woolner explains. “Also, the soundtrack had really broken, really creepy violin playing. That was a big inspiration. And the opening song on the album, ‘Zion’, is obviously very inspired by the dance rave in The Matrix Reloaded. So the album has a lot of visual inspirations more than it has references to actual bands.”
Having just returned from an international tour, Woolner sounds pretty damn keen to be back on his home turf. “We all missed our family, friends and our dogs quite a lot,” he laughs. “And also things like sleep and doing nothing. Just sitting around and playing computer games. You always crave the opposite to what you’re doing: as soon as you get back home and chill out, you want to get back on the road. So it’s always the opposite.”
Meanwhile, the boys are gearing up for their biggest national tour to date, starting at their home in Canberra and kicking on for seven weeks in Australia and New Zealand. “It’s going to be our biggest production yet!” Woolner enthuses. “There’s going to be big shows and it’s going to be fun to play a whole catalogue of new music that’s out and available for people to listen to. It’s a whole new production and visual set-up; we’re going all out on this one.”
Safia’sInternal is out Friday September 9 through Warner, and he performs atEnmore Theatre on Sunday October 2.
