Dear Seattle’s Brae Fisher Reflects On New Album ‘TOY’
The wait is over and now is the time that fans can finally unwrap Sydney alt-rockers Dear Seattle’s third studio album TOY. Boasting earlier singles Counting Hours, Evergreen, idc, Nothing’s Stopping Me Now, Sungazer, and Say What You Want, TOY dazzles with raw lyricism and salient songwriting, with the band teaming up with returning producer Fletcher Matthews to powerfully level up the Dear Seattle signature sound without sacrificing the quartet’s core sonic charm in the process.
Love, loss, addiction, nostalgia, and every salient moment of life in between beats at the insatiable core of TOY. Showcasing Dear Seattle both brandishing their trademark infectious craftsmanship while also showcasing their palpable creative growth over the past few years, TOY is an emphatic collection of relatable anthems to belt at the top of your lungs; an album that feels instantly familiar yet fresh in one exhilarating sweep that unfurls across the space of twelve tracks. Brae Fisher from the band talks to Hi Fi Way about the album.
Was it hard keeping a lid on the excitement leading up to the release of the album?
Yeah, definitely. It’s nice though, it’s been so good doing the album launch parties because it just feels like to me these are the reasons that you write albums in the first place. They’re more intimate shows where you actually get a bit of time to go out and chat to people who appreciate the music, appreciate the band, chat to them about music and life and how things connect with them. Finding out their favourite songs and all that kind of stuff. It’s a really nice process and I think we missed out on it on the last record because of Covid. We’ve been craving it for like a really long time.
How did these shows go?
Really good, there was four shows playing Hobart, Melbourne, Perth, and then Adelaide and all four of them were sold out, which is awesome. It was just hectic, it’s so fun to play smaller rooms again as well because they’re all intimate venues and when you stack that many people in there, especially in summer, it’s just like a sweat fest and it turns into chaos pretty quickly. It’s just so fun. It’s the type of show that we grew up doing where we were playing these smaller pubs in the early days of Dear Seattle. To jump back into those rooms with this intimate energy where you’re standing pretty much face to face with the people in the front row and you can see everyone in the room because it’s limited capacity, these are the people who are there are all the ones who really want to be there. You can’t deny how good the energy is at those kinds of shows.
It must be great having that energy going in to a new year as the album comes out and a bigger tour at some stage?
Definitely, it’s always nice to play these kinds of shows and have that energy but now it’s, okay, how do we now then translate that to the bigger rooms as well to make those big rooms feel the same but just on a bigger scale? We’re putting our thinking gaps on at the moment and like starting to formulate what the actual album tour for this record is going to look like, but we want to really step it up and take it to a level that we haven’t really touched on before in Dear Seattle and make it feel something super special.
Does that also give you a lot of confidence too, knowing that there’s still plenty of love there for the band?
I think it is funny you mentioned that because the song that kicked everything off for us was The Meadows off our self-titled EP, which came out in 2016 and it’s always been that song that’s just been so beloved by our fans, that it’s always been at the top of our Spotify. I distinctly remember when we were releasing singles off this record, I was like, I really just want our new songs to knock that off the top spot and like start pushing into those top spots. It has been doing that and it feels so good even on these shows we’ve just been playing new songs on album launch party tour. Chatting to people after the show have been saying how genuinely excited they are about this new record and the songs they are connecting with more than many in the past. It actually feels like there is the same love coming for all of the new stuff whereas I think when you get to this stage as a band, it can often be that like you’ve done your good stuff and that’s why people love you and the rest maybe don’t like it. The reaction to this new record has just been on a whole other level and it’s felt like we could be stepping into a territory where new favourites are emerging.
Do you feel like this one really challenged the band?
Funnily enough, in a way, yes, definitely! At the start of the record when we started putting the record together we were like okay we have two options here. It’s a bit of a fork in the road. We can either venture into a completely different style and change the sound of the band and move on to maybe a different sonic palette and genre, or we can double down and just do the absolute best version of Dear Seattle. That has always been our style. We ended up opting for that because we want to have that record that people can hold and be like this is a Dear Seattle record, from start to finish every song is as strong as the next and it ends up being this thing that feels like, I don’t know, to me in my mind I just think of like Hungry Ghost by Violet Soho being that record where you look at it and you’re like, damn this is that band’s record and every song just hits on another level.
So, that was what we wanted to do with this one and whilst that meant that we were more comfortable writing it because it was sticking to our same wheelhouse, it also set the bar of expectation so high we pretty much agreed at the start we were not going to let anything go through and end up on the record that doesn’t hit that bar to the standard that we want it to be. I think that was the difficult thing of being, okay, cool, well now we just got to do the work. We have got to write enough songs that we can get to the point where we can cut it down to a record where every single song from start to finish is at that level. We feel like we’ve achieved it and we are super happy with how it all turned out. I’m really glad that we set that expectation of ourselves.
Were there a lot of discussions about what type of record you wanted to make, or did it take time to get to that point?
No, I think like we had been considering it a fair bit since the last album. It was in the minds of like, what are we going to do next? Where do we want to go? I think like a lot of it was a matter of like reflecting on our career and what we have put out already. When you get to this stage and you’ve got quite a few albums that you can go back and look on and be like, these are the ones that we are really proud of. These are the songs that we are like super, super happy with and these are the ones that connected most with fans. The you can get a sense of what you do best and how impactful your band can be with the music that you write. For us, our main goal always is just to create music that makes people have an emotional response that they can connect to and maybe feel seen and heard in the struggles that they’re going through or the life experiences that they’re having.
If they can hear a song and be like, oh damn, someone else is feeling that too, it makes it that little bit easier. That’s always been our main goal and once you go back and listen to the songs that have achieved that, ones people are listening to regularly, even though it came out in 2016 or 2017 blah blah blah, you start to get a bit of a an idea of what your band means beyond just yourselves as a band. We just really wanted to focus on that and try and create a record that we are most proud of that people would also connect to.
Did you find that you’re a lot tougher on yourselves in terms of the songs that you were coming up with and what were allowed to go through?
Yeah, there’s obviously the struggles in making an album as well, but I think if you have arguments or you’re having a conflict deciding who loves what song more or what part of a song should change or shouldn’t change, that kind of thing, it’s like people can see that as not a good thing but really it just shows that everyone cares. We had multiple full band meetings with our producer Fletcher as well our manager to decide on these things and be like, what things are good enough to make it onto the record and what are we really trying to do? I think having that is actually really good because then everyone has the buy-in and they really feel like we are forging ahead and trying to make something that is to this level, of course there’s going to be arguments of like what people feel is on the level and what isn’t.
At the start we all committed to it and I think we all knew what we were going for. We were happy to have those harder conversations and navigate those conflicts in a way where it’s cool, like obviously this isn’t affecting us as friends or as band mates or anything. We know that we’re all arguing because we’re just passionate about it and we want it to be the best it could possibly be. While there are moments like that where it’s hard and it challenges you, that’s why it ends up being better than stuff you’ve done in the past.
What does 2025 look like for Dear Seattle? Mostly touring all year?
Yeah, that’s the plan to be honest. We have a lot of stuff in the works and it’s going to be super busy. I obviously don’t think I can say just yet because as it may or may not happen, but there is so much that we are all just working out like how are we going to make it work. We want make it fully about Dear Seattle and try to see if we can do this thing and make it all of our full-time jobs, turning into a project that actually sustains us in that way because it’s hard being a musician obviously as you would know. It’s not cheap and you still have to work other jobs on the side and stuff like that. So, if there’s any way that you can push your project to a point where it ends up being something you can solely focus on, that only ends up being better for the project in the long run as well.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Dear Seattle’s TOY is out now via Domestic La La. Order yours HERE…
