Alt-J’s Joe Newman on his love of Australia and why he made friends and family cry on The Dream

UK indie rockers Alt-J have revealed the odd way one of their tracks came to life and how Australia has shaped them.

UK indie rock band Alt-J will tour new album The Dream in Australia in September.

Australia has always been a happy hunting ground for UK indie rockers Alt-J.

Not only has the trio of Joe Newman, Thom Sonny Green and Gus Unger-Hamilton had three top 10 albums in this country thanks to hits including Tesselate, Left Hand Free and in Cold Blood, and graced some our biggest stages and festivals, they also enjoyed some of the first successes outside of their native Europe here.

Championed by the late, great promoter Michael Gudinski, a close friend of their manager, Alt-J first visited these shores nearly a decade ago, and singer-guitarist Newman still remembers it vividly.

At the time he and his bandmates took it as validation that the music they had made together while at university in Leeds could connect with audiences on the other side of the world.

And in hindsight, it was a reminder of the band’s dizzying rise from tiny clubs to arena-fillers and chart-toppers in the space of a few short years.

“It was probably one of the highlights of our early careers,” Newman says from his London studio.

“We were so discombobulated because the level of success that we experienced in such a quick time meant that we knew nothing else. So we just thought it was normal. Looking back on it, it really wasn’t normal.

“It was actually far from normal and extremely rare that bands have that kind of impact so early on in their career. And I think my memories of Australia reinforced that feeling of how crazy it was. Australia, not only is it like my second home, I love playing Australia.”

UK indie -rock band Alt-J, from left, Joe Newman, Gus Unger-Hamilton and Thom Sonny Green.

Newman is not just playing up his Australia connections for the local fans either: his partner Darcy Wallace hails from Melbourne and the pair return frequently, most recently for the Christmas just gone.

Newman’s next trip in September, however, to tour the band’s fourth album The Dream, will look very different.

“Gus and I became fathers last year, and so we’re going to have a creche on tour,” he says. “So, that’s going to be new and fun and exciting and unpredictable and tiring.”

A pre-pandemic trip to Melbourne also provided the inspiration for one of the new tracks from The Dream, the languid, laid-back U&Me.

The song was originally written, then nearly lost, during a soundcheck jam, about a blissful day hanging out with friends at a daytime festival on New Year’s Day of 2020, just before coronavirus turned the world upside down.

“About four weeks later, the pandemic happened and all of the lyrics took on a whole new meaning,” Newman says.

“It was kind of a celebration of the world before the huge change. so it kind of took on a more irreverent kind of sense of fun.”

Alt-J Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory in January 2013 for a Laneway Festival sideshow.

At the other end of the spectrum on The Dream, but also pandemic related, is the heart-wrenching Get Better.

Oddly, the song began life five years ago as something Newman sang to his partner when she was experiencing period pain.

He promptly forgot about it until she reminded him years later and during the Covid-19 lockdowns and 2020 he realised it might fit with a “series of vignettes” he’d written musing on what it must be like to lose a loved one.

“I’ve always been fascinated with that inevitable trauma that we will all end up facing,” he says.

“But I suppose it was maybe even more acute given that we were in a pandemic where people are losing loved ones every day.

“So it’s not directly about the pandemic, even though I do sort of reference frontline workers. It’s more the macro experience of going through a loss and one that you really don’t know whether you’ll survive.”

Newman knew he was on to something when he even made himself cry for the very first time while writing it, which both shocked and delighted him. His suspicions were confirmed when he played it to his nearest and dearest.

Alt-J at the Adelaide Entertainment Theatre in 2018 on the Relaxer tour. Picture: Simon Cross

“There is no greater compliment than someone crying and I’ve never written a song that has such a high cry rate,” he says with a laugh.

“It’s like an 80 per cent cry rate. I’ve canvassed my local community, friends and family, and a lot of them told me that they’ve had a moment with that song.”

The Dream is Alt-J’s first album in nearly five years, delayed not just by the pandemic but also the need to rest and decompress after years of relentless recording and touring.

Drummer Green is immune-comprised after a kidney transplant in 2008, meaning the band had to take lockdowns even more seriously, but they embraced the chance to make the studio “a sanctuary” where they could write and record in privacy and at their own pace.

Newman is of the firm belief that “nothing should be off limits in terms of subject material for writing”, leading to an typically eclectic collection of songs from the tongue-in-cheek, radio-friendly Hard Drive Gold, about the cryptocurrency boom, to the dark, true crime podcast inspired Losing My Mind.

Newman decided long ago that the band’s ambitions in the studio would never be tempered by the consideration that they would have to reproduce their sometimes dense and intricate soundscapes live on stage. Nevertheless, he and his bandmates promise that the coming tour – the band’s first since 2018 – will do justice to the music.

“We always sound bigger live than we do on record and we’re very diligent at making the album sound as good as it can do live because obviously, what we’re playing is often quite complicated,” he says.

“We’re not like a town crier just playing cowboy chords – it’s more subtle and detailed. So it means that you have to concentrate. We work really hard at honing that live performance and we’ve got an incredible live show now.”

The Dream is out now. Alt-J tour Australia in September. Tickets on sale February 18. Dates and details at frontiertouring.com