If you like your punk hard to pin down – and often veering quite far from punk altogether – Tim & The Boys will be an exciting proposition. The Sydney trio’s debut album, Growing, is a drum-machined curiosity that opens on a diffuse experimental note before doling out itchy faux-New Wave (‘White Guys’) and longer, slower dirges (‘Hear Us’), among other contrasts. By the time we reach the brooding post-punk of closer ‘Silent Room’, the band seems much evolved from their rawer, more overtly punk beginnings on the 2015 demo Hard Won.
Despite that nebulous genre citizenship, frontman Tim Collier usually describes the band as punk to people who haven’t heard it yet. “It’s the closest semblance to a label that makes sense,” he says, pointing out that he’d call Devo punk too.
Growing is the first release for Sydney label Meatspin, whose founder Max Easton has contributed to the city’s underground music scene as a journalist and musician. Tim & The Boys settled on Meatspin while mixing the album, but when asked if being on a label in the same city made sense for the band, Collier laughs. “I don’t know that anything necessarily makes sense for us. Or that much of what we do makes any sense. It’s more having a bit of an idea and then going with our gut on a lot of things.”
That notion of chasing a vague idea from the outset gets to the very heart of the band, from their tongue-in-cheek lyrics to the sputtering Roland TR-505 drum machine that powers every song, despite Collier referring to it as a toy.
“I constantly have nightmares about it not working,” he admits. “It takes six double-A batteries, so if you leave it on and don’t play a show for a week, it runs out of batteries. So I freak out about all the songs being erased, because the memory doesn’t have any access to power.” To that end, the band has been talking about buying another one to recreate all the songs on it as a backup.
Collier starts out writing drum patterns on that not-so-trusty Roland – either on his own or with the band – before building up a catalogue of patterns that then inspires the actual songwriting process. “That’s how we’ve written pretty much every song,” he recalls. “Putting on a drum pattern and going, ‘What’s going to work?’ And carving our way towards the right thing.”
I try to make [music that is] fairly grotesque, or at least confronting.
Flanked by bassist Daniel Grosz (Dead Farmers) and guitarist Will Harley (Housewives), Collier sings and handles the drum machine and synth parts. He’s the focal point when the band plays live, which can lead to audience members wondering how seriously to take Tim & The Boys. Collier says the crowd response ranges from chin-scratching analysis to punk-y thrashing about. “I had [someone] tell me it was really good dancing music,” he says. “That’s funny because I think about it more thematically. I try to make it fairly grotesque, or at least confronting.”
Circling back to his earlier mention of Devo though, he concedes that a band can be danceable and subversive at the same time. “That’s a good place to start,” he agrees. “Not to be conclusively anything. If you can work from that and then find something within a solid grey area, I think you’ve done a good job.”
Launch shows are being planned for Growing in Sydney and beyond – but not until the vinyl has arrived. That said, the album is out digitally via Bandcamp, and you can hear Collier’s mischievous pop-culture re-appropriation in the sample songs ‘Gary Glitter’s Eyes’ and ‘Hey’. There’s also an unabashed nod to a classic Cat Stevens tune in ‘First Cut’.
“It started as a way for us to joke about things,” explains Collier. “Then I started doing it intentionally as a way of not necessarily owning the intellectual property that I was presenting. I think one of the most problematic areas of songwriting is this idea that everything is a self-portrait, and that you’re constantly writing songs from your own perspective.”
So when the band drops a few iconic Spice Girls lyrics in ‘Hey’, it becomes a potential talking point about how music is packaged and sold – in this case, the girl group’s 1996 smash ‘Wannabe’. “That song was written by a guy in the first place,” observes Collier, “and you think about the Spice Girls as a marketing tactic for record labels to sell feminism to teenage girls. All of a sudden it kind of reveals itself, because we made it disgusting.”
I think one of the most problematic areas of songwriting is this idea that everything is a self-portrait.
More serious, though, is ‘Silent Room’, which he admits is one of the few songs he’s written about his own experiences, rather than some analysis or critique. It’s about his dog dying, and he gets emotional when singing it live – especially if his wife is in the room, because the lyrics came from conversations about losing their pet.
Given the absurd edge of much of Growing, that late fling with autobiography could be Tim & The Boys’ biggest twist of all. “That’s part of the dynamic of the band,” he concludes. “All of these contrasts, all of these weird twists on what you might expect us to do.” To that end, the band members relish teasing out just how much to reveal in their songs. “What part do we want to stay a mystery? We have a lot of fun figuring that out.”
Growing is out now through Meatspin Records.
