dreamy than the last album which is kind of based around, I guess, Fleetwood Mac and then a lot of more modern artists like, kind of related to the fact we listen to Toro Y Moi a lot, and Tame Impala and Ariel Pink, and trying to bring that into our own world.”
was younger it seemed cool to bitch about bands. Overseas if you’re successful or if you’re achieving something musically you’re given praise for that, and people look up to that and it’s what people want to achieve.”
I pointed out that, like Miami Horror, Kevin Parker of Tame Impala cites Supertramp as a big influence on his music, “Yeah I was really surprised by that because they did some mixtape once and I saw that Tame Impala had two or three Supertramp songs in the mixtape and I was like, ‘Oh wow, I wouldn’t have thought they were into that!’ It’s like, even if you look at some of our other influences over the last few years … The Beatles, Pink Floyd, just a whole bunch of random bands, they were into [them] as well. It’s just funny ‘cause you’re hearing complete opposites.”
“There’s the whole radio world in Australia that’s limiting, you can only really break through if you’re on radio and played a lot.” He compares the success of bands like Neon Indian and Toro Y Moi being extremely different overseas in comparison to Australia—how is it possible for bands like them to be big overseas but not in Australia, he wonders: “And that might be kind of related to people listening, of course; there’s always that question of how much can a radio station challenge the audience a little more … there’s like, a middle ground that’s not really being attended to in Australia, and that gap is where a lot of bands fail.”
Album aside, I wanted to know from Plant’s perspective the band noticed a differenciaion between the music industry in the US and Australia. “Compared to the world basically, it’s quite different,” he says. “People here, they have this kind of… tall poppy syndrome thing where you’re not allowed to succeed, and if you succeed you’re selling out or something. And that’s not necessarily related to personal experiences, it’s just watching it and even being a part of it, you know? When I
So what about different platforms, like social media? Has that been a tool for Miami Horror or even Toro Y Moi? “I wouldn’t say that social media has done much…there’s a lot of fake stuff going on you know, like I’ve seen people with a million Soundcloud likes and it’s an absolute lie. How did you get a million?” He laughs, “Like the ratio doesn’t make any sense … it’s hard to trust social media, it’s really easy to blow things out of proportion. At the end of the day the music says it all.”
CULTURE / 45