Tonight Alive

Tonight Alive may be considered a pop-rock outfit in certain circles, but their sound has the potential to surprise some, especially on their excellent new album Limitless.

It’s an appropriate title, given the Sydneysiders have not confined themselves to the usual conventions of the genre. They have spread their musical wings while staying true to the ever-growing core audience they have built up over the last eight years, a difficult task if ever there was one.

We meet with singer Jenna McDougall and guitarist Whakaio Taahi on a warm mid-summer’s morning at a café in South Melbourne to chat about the expansive new sounds they explore on their third album, and what inspires them.

“I love the epic, spacious thing,” Taahi says fervently. “That’s my favourite stuff. A big influence that I’ve been listening to a lot is movie scores and soundtracks. I really got into a lot of Hans Zimmer’s stuff and I delved into how he did his stuff, and that was a huge influence on a lot of the music. I wanted to do it differently this time.”

Taahi feels the length of time the band spent writing and recording the album also had a strong impact on the way it sounds. “I think it’s so varied because it was over a period of two years that we wrote this, so it’s like a snapshot of the best of those two years.”

Both McDougall and Taahi are justifiably very proud of what they have come up with. “We stand by everything we recorded, everything we wrote,” McDougall says. “Having been the people that were on that journey and facing the challenges and facing the expectations from ourselves and from the people we surround ourselves with, the journey was what made the record what it is.”

“I’m excited,” Taahi adds. “Every single song has a purpose, it’s on there for a certain reason, whether that be lyrics, or just the mood of the album. I don’t think we could have done it any other way.”

Though fans are finally able to enjoy the finished product now the album is out, they might not have a clear appreciation of what the band went through to arrive at that point. Tonight Alive experienced a truly gruelling and soul-searching two years as they prepared Limitless, and this also contributed to the strength and variation of the record’s sound in a monumental way.

“Those first nine days in the studio just turned our lives upside down,” McDougall recalls with a mix of dread and awe. “We tore the songs apart and tore us apart as people too. But what it taught us to do was converse with our instruments. We were talking to each other with what we were playing, complementing each other with our parts.

“Nobody was competing anymore, there was no repetition, there [weren’t] two guitars strumming the same thing. There [were] no two rhythms that were the same. Every instrument learned how to use its voice.”

The album’s lyrics are particularly autobiographical, in that they reflect the catharsis of the creative process. “The lyrics are about the personal choice that went into the whole thing, to do this for our own happiness, and to make sure that this record, if it became successful, was on our own terms,” McDougall explains. “It was kind of a looking-myself-in-the-eye moment, and I think I got the purest expression of myself and our band with those lyrics.”