The Only Way Is Up For Voyager

Australian electronic rock outfit Voyager, who thrilled global audiences with their Eurovision performance of Promise complete with the iconic, retro Toyota MR2, are back with their long-awaited eighth studio album, Fearless in Love, scheduled for release on July 14th via Season Of Mist. The band comprised of Daniel “Danny” Estrin (vocals/ keyboards), Simone Dow (guitars), Scott Kay (guitars), Alex Canion (bass), and Ashley Doodkorte (drums) have been creating music together for over a decade.

On Fearless in Love, sweeping vocals paired with emotive lyrics inspired by the grit and glam of 80s and 90s film overlay heavy guitar riffs and percussion to create a sonic journey that pushes the boundary of what fans have come to expect from Voyager. Fearless In Love is out now and Hi Fi Way spoke to Ashley Doodkorte about the album and what lies ahead.

It has been a massive year for Voyager and looking back can you believe everything that’s happened and starting to unfold for the band?
Absolutely not. I’ve made it a point to not let it all sink in yet, so we keep going and don’t rest on our laurels.

Eurovision would be a massive highlight what stands out from your time as a part of that?
That was probably the most time that we’ve all spent together consistently as a band. We’ve done tours and stuff before, but never as long as like six weeks solid just in each other’s spaces. It was a really good time. We didn’t get sick of each other, no fights, nothing like that. We were just really all along for the ride and having an awesome time. I think as well, when you’re there with all the other artists it’s like a big old grownup band camp and there’s no one else that really understands what you’re going through. Having them all there is really cool.

Can you believe how much your life’s changed since Eurovision and being out there to such a massive audience?
It’s lucky for me being a drummer because I’m nowhere near as recognisable as someone like Danny is. He’s definitely had a bit of a shift. He gets recognised wherever he goes. Now sometimes people rock up at the airport to see him and stuff like that, and we get a little bit of that as this band. I did just have to hand in my resignation at my job the other day to have the time to focus on all things Voyager, it’s like pretty scary but at the same time, that’s always been the dream is to be able to sort of focus full time on music. Having this opportunity and very, very supportive partners has been really helpful with that too.

Has the Eurovision experience set up the next twelve months or so for Voyager?
I think it’s enhanced it. We always had our plans in place to release our album and tour Australia, which we just finished and we had a European tour on the books. We are looking at going to North America again, all that sort of thing. Having that exposure that Eurovision brings just makes it all more successful and makes the shows bigger and it just makes everything more possible. It’s a good injection of fuel in the tank I think because you sometimes plug away at this and it’s so much work and a lot of the time it’s just hard to get seen. Having that light shine on us just adds that extra motivation I think so it’s really exciting.

The Adelaide show was amazing, was like a stadium rock show in a small room.
That was a great show, we had a blast in Adelaide.

Did you the whole tour feel like that?
Pretty much, yeah. That was our first proper sold out tour of Australia and the vibe was awesome. It’s a really nice balance of like, there were a lot of people who obviously come to our shows a lot before and are big fans, but there was a whole lot of new people as well who got to know us from Eurovision. It’s a really nice mix of people and it just makes the whole thing a bit of a party.

Particularly with Spotify are you noticing people are going back deep in to the back catalogue and getting in to your earlier stuff?
One thing you notice a little bit, on Facebook for example, there’s always been this Voyager Australia fans group and it had the hardcore fans in there, but you didn’t see that much of it. Since Eurovision that thing like on the daily is just such a hive of activity and you always see people come through and go, oh my God, they’ve got like seven albums I can listen to and I’ve heard this song from Ghost Mile and I really like that one or some people go way back to like Universal and Element V and it’s just like who is this band? Because it’s a very different sound back then.

You must be stoked that people can finally hear the album?
Oh yes, particularly this one as well because we finished this album, had it all mixed and mastered by April, June last year. We’ve been waiting over a year for this album to come out, which is unusual for us because normally we do something and then we go through the process of starting the cycle of getting it out there. A big part of waiting is the vinyl production cycle, which is really backed up at the moment. Even through our label and everything, it took eight to ten months just to get a vinyl pressed, which delayed it a bit. We were going to release it earlier, but then the Eurovision thing happened and it’s like what better time to announce an album than like in grand final week at Eurovision. So, we’ve been sitting on it, we’ve been really excited about this album for a long time and it’s going to be a really good feeling to finally get it out there. There’s a lot of tracks we’ve already released off it. I think we’ve released like four tracks or something off that album, including the two Eurovision ones Promise and Dreamer. There’s some other tracks on the album that are amongst my favourite Voyager songs, so I’m really excited for people to hear them.

So how would you describe Fearless In Love?
I think if I were to compare it to Colours in the Sun, the last album, I think it’s a little more focused maybe. It’s definitely more emotive and I’m not exactly sure why that is and maybe a little bit darker as well, but at the same time I’d say it’s more accessible and poppy. I think after our experience doing the Australian national final back in 2022, we took a look at our songwriting through the lens of having to write for the three minute Eurovision time limit. We thought, well, you know, can these songs benefit from a bit of tightening up or producing? We did do a bit of an edit as we went through. I found it intensified the songs a bit, so maybe that’s a good way to look at it. We distilled all the songs down to what we wanted the audience to feel for each one and I think it’s all the stronger for it.

Did you ideas for these songs change much when you were in the studio and did it all go to plan?
Not at all. We wrote most of the album just coming out of the Covid lockdowns and everything that we had over here. We wrote them outside of a rehearsal room, which was different for us and got together at Scott’s house. We sat there instrument at a time building them piece by piece. It was different for because when you’re rehearsing in a jam room, everything’s quite loud and you miss some of the nuances, I think, of each other’s playing. This time they were all laid bare and we could really dial into what everyone was doing. When we got into the studio to record it all, our engineer and mixer and just awesome producer Matt Templeman suggested that we just record it live, which we haven’t really done before. Normally, with this kind of music, you multi-track it all. When we got into the studio for this one, we set up, we all learnt our parts individually and what you hear on the album a lot of the time is the first time we’ve played those songs as a band together. So, there’s this interesting urgency and immediacy about the album, which is really exciting.

Did that create a little bit more pressure on the other hand as well?
It kind of does and it doesn’t, I was like two weeks out from going into the studio, it was like, holy crap, do I know how to play these songs well enough to go and record them with everyone in the studio? It certainly forced me to get into my rehearsal space and really dial in the songs, maybe a bit more than I was used to because previously we had written them as a band in a room, so I’d already known how to play them. It was just a matter of tightening them up, but this one was more about learning everything by myself and then delivering in the studio.

Did it take a bit of rehearsing before recording live and what was the energy like? Was there a real sort of sense of excitement as these songs were starting to come together?
It was really, really exciting because as a band we were hearing us play them together for the first time. I took a lot of video of the whole thing as well where you just see the smiles on everyone’s faces as we’re going and play the tracks going, holy crap, these sound really, really good as a band and particularly the closing track, you watch everyone in the last minute or two of that song and everyone’s just looking at each other going like, this is huge and really awesome. I think we did more takes of that song just because it felt really good to play.

Is it too early to have a favourite song off the album yet?
Oh, not really! I’ve got two, one is The Lamenting and the other is the closing track Gren. I think they’re probably the most emotive tracks that Voyager ever done. They’re the ones I put on repeat.

Has the creative process kept going?
We’re always throwing ideas around. Since last year we focused on writing Promise for Eurovision and then once that train started all of our attention was on that. We’ve got ideas and little skeletons of songs lying around, but we haven’t begun new songwriting in earnest yet. With that said though, Simone, Scott and I got together and started working on some new tunes. I think that’s all going to pick up very soon.

Are there plans for another Australian tour this year?
At the moment our focus is heading to Europe. We’ve got a tour booked for pretty much all of October that we’re really excited about. So, that’s our main focus at this stage. We definitely have plans in the works for Australia again, but we’re still sort of working out timing on that one. Not a hundred percent sure yet, but definitely will be happening, just don’t know when.

Interview By Rob Lyon

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