Making an album is a big commitment at the best of times, let alone when you’re trying to balance family and work, have two people playing the role of six and are doing the whole project yourself in a garage studio. For Jerome Higgins and Terry Gardiner of Melbourne band The Starks, the road to release for their debut album The Earth & The Ego was no light effort.

“We did it all at home,” says Higgins. “We built a studio in Terry’s garage up in Mount Dandenong. He was on drums and vocals and I was playing guitar and keyboards. I had a lot of recording gear from being in other bands, so between us we had a whole studio’s worth of equipment.

“Before recording the album, we hadn’t really done much. We both had young families and had hit a stage in our lives where our music had been pushed to the background. We were both still writing a lot of songs, so the album was really just an avenue to get these piles of songs that we had out of our heads.”

The process started back in 2011, with the pair initially intending to put together an EP.

“It’s been a while coming,” explains Higgins. “We finished the record close to a year ago and started recording three years before that. We’d get together once a fortnight or once a month – whenever we could. We thought we’d put out an EP and had half a dozen songs mixed, but we ended up scrapping most of those. From that, we decided that we’d knuckle down and try to record a whole album.”

After a three-year recording process, Higgins and Gardiner were left with the task of putting together a live band. The duo was joined by fellow Mount Dandenong local Phil Moyes on drums and two of Higgins’ former bandmates – keyboardist/guitarist Paul Oswald and Tristan Querol on guitar.

The album draws on a range of influences, from Britpop to classic rock. It even features guest vocals from Dallas Crane’s Dave Larkin, who lives around the corner from the founding members. The Starks have been categorised as playing everything from psychedelic rock to ’70s soul, but Higgins prefers a different label.

“I call it space country,” he laughs. “That to me evokes some of our influences that haven’t been referenced so much, like Neil Young and Ryan Adams combined with more synth-based stuff like Brian Eno and Roxy Music.”

The band’s influences stretch further than just the musical sphere, sharing a name with a certain fictional family from Winterfell.

“Yeah, the name comes from Game Of Thrones,” laughs Higgins. “When we were finishing the record, we thought, ‘Oh, we better get some photos done.’ Terry’s wife made these awesome jackets – they were these mountain, sort of wolf-like jackets – and we went out and took some photos up at the Mount Dandenong lookout, overlooking the setting sun and the city. It was way too Game Of Thrones –completely unintentional – but we literally looked like we’d just come out of the northern winter.”

The album was released, quite fittingly, on Monday April 13 – the same day as the Game Of Thrones season five premiere. “Again, completely unintentional,” laughs Higgins. “Hopefully we got mixed up in a few search terms.”

The Earth & The Ego out now independently through Bandcamp.

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