Death From Above 1979 To Rock Adelaide Tonight

Legendary Canadian duo Death From Above 1979 are in the country bringing their electrifying sound to Australia in April, 2025 as part of their global tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of their debut LP, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. Released in 2004, the genre defying album has become a cult classic while still remaining influential two decades on as new fans and artists discover its boundary pushing sonics.

Known for their raw and stripped back sound, Death From Above 1979 has been described as everything from noise punk to dance punk, embodying a DIY ethos. You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine contained edge of your seat classics including, Romantic Rights, Blood On Our Hands, Black History Month and Little Girls, but let’s face it, every track is killer.

To celebrate You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine’s 20th Anniversary, the band have undertaken a massive world tour, which includes four shows in Australia next April. All the while embarking on a year long recording project to re-imagine and honour their iconic, flagship debut. The 2025 tour marks the first time the band have visited Australia in almost a decade and a half! First coming in 2005 and then again in 2011 for Parklife – to say their return is long overdue is a massive understatement! Jesse F. Keeler talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

It’s been ten years, it’s fantastic that you guys are coming back. Are you looking forward to making the trip down?
Well, no one looks forward to the trip, but getting there is fine. That’s crazy it’s been ten years. Last time we were there was playing at that festival, the name is totally escaping me now [Parklife]. Fans were giving us a hard time about not playing club shows, so there you go. It only took a decade for us to come around and do it. We were coming there more often a long time ago, I think the first time we came there was before You’re A Women, I’m A Machine came out. I remember one kid was crowd surfing and he got dropped and his back got cut open from like the top to the bottom. Like terrifying! Then he came to the next show the next time we were there and showed us his scar that went over his entire back. Another real fond memory, I remember playing that festival ten years ago. I can’t remember what city it was in, but someone was there in a wheelchair and the crowd put him up and he was just crowd surfing around in his chair. I’ve played a few shows over the last thirty years of touring, like before this band too. But I still have that visual picture and like snippet of this dude in a wheelchair crowd surfing stays with me.

How hard was it trying to get everything to line up for this tour?
It’s tough, right, depending on how boring you want it to be, but you know, getting down there’s not cheap. I think we’re bringing the bare minimum of stuff we can do the shows with and it’s still tough and you have to play enough to make it worthwhile, but then you can’t do it too much. We’re playing in Japan and Singapore on the way down. That was a big part of it. We were just trying to figure out like once we’re crossing the Pacific Ocean, we should do as many things over there. There was some stuff that we were going to do in China that kept coming up and then going away and coming up and going away. That was sort of dragging on, and of course, we all lost three years of those ten years to the sickness.

Do you get nostalgic celebrating such a defining album as You’re A Women, I’m A Machine?
I don’t think Seb and I are very nostalgic people. We might be about things in our personal lives, although my memory isn’t good enough. I think for when it comes to myself to be like that. I think the big thing for us and certainly for me is I think I’m a lot better at playing now than I was. I think Seb’s a lot better at playing and singing than we were. When my dad was a musician and I remember I love this one record that he made in 1972, and I would put it on and he would listen to it and be like, ah, shit. He had all kinds of complaints about the sound, or he heard all the things that I’d never hear.

I think that’s how I feel about the old record if I go back to it and I’m like, what the hell was I doing? Why? Sometimes I would see an old video of myself playing a song. I’m like, well, I’m working way too hard there. I don’t even play the songs the same way anymore because I’ve figured out better fingering to do and stuff like that. I think as you get older and get better at the thing that you’re doing, for us this is like an opportunity to feel, I don’t want to say better, but it’s more like congruent about this record where you feel really confident about what you’re doing in the moment. How I feel about the new stuff, playing these songs and like playing the record from front to back has given us an opportunity to feel the same way about old record as we do about the new stuff. I think we’re generally a forward looking band.

Like Seb said, after we’ve done this, I don’t ever want to do it again. Like, no more looking back, just go forward. But at the same time, it’s like super satisfying to take those songs that you wrote in almost in ignorance, you know what I mean? That was one hundred percent of the music we’d written. There weren’t any songs that didn’t make it. Everything was there. Doing it on purpose and doing it to the level that we feel good about, I don’t know, it’s not nostalgia. It’s taking something, it’s made us appreciate what we did, I listen to the songs and I’m like that’s awesome. I forgot about this or I wouldn’t do that now, I should do that, that’s great or whatever.

Do you take a moment to reflect momentarily on a job well done and surviving in this tough business for thirty odd years?
Well, the wildest thing is we’re pretty loud up on the stage, so I don’t hear it as much, but when we’re playing and the crowd is singing every word, but also like singing the bass riffs, like, holy shit, you guys do you really care about this, you really like it? That is wild, especially when the lookout and see a crowd where I’m like, I don’t think you were born when we made this. I can’t really ask for anything else!

Was re-recording the album a tough decision or do you feel like it was something that you really wanted to do? I’ve read bits and pieces of other interviews where you might not have been not quite as happy with how certain parts come across.
Well, how nerdy do you want to be? I mixed a lot of that record with Al our producer, who was my partner in MSTRKRFT, before MSTRKRFT existed. We were mixing that record in the middle of the night because the record label didn’t give us enough money to actually get enough studio time to make the record. This is before everyone had a studio in their house. When we were working, it was always in the middle of the night. The studio would let us work when there was no one there. So they said, you could come in at midnight, but you had to be gone by 6:00 AM and everything had to be plugged and patched in the same way it was when you got there. So, we finished that whole record from midnight to 6:00 AM, the studio was awesome.

There was a lot of things that I didn’t know. I didn’t know about phase. I didn’t know that you if you had too many of the same position room mics, you’d end up with weird washing of sound and stuff like that. Now, no one else hears it but me. I listen to it and I hear, why the hell did I have, I should have picked one as the room. It didn’t. Anyway, if there’s any nerds on this stuff reading, they’ll be like, oh yeah, of course. There was a lot of stuff that I did that I would never do now, but in the end, I listened to it and I’m hoping that someday I’ll get to the point where I can listen to that record, the original version and not want to jump into the past and change something.

That said, when we were making new recordings, partially we thought it would be fun, you know, and also easy because it’s not like we’re writing anything, you know, like, let’s just do this. It would be fun. It’s something we can do and then as we started, it was like, wow. Oh, these are actually quite different, everything about them thus far. The record is all recorded. We haven’t finished mixing it yet. It ended up being, for me anyway, dramatically different. Better in some ways. But it’s not really like we weren’t trying to beat it or replace it or anything.

We got our record labels to release us. We got rid of our management, we got rid of everything, so we could just do whatever we wanted. And it’s like, what do you want to do? I don’t know. Let’s just record that record again. Let’s see if we can, um, I know it’s a thing that people have been doing for their, whatever, like the Taylor Swift of the World, re-recording, so they own the Master, but it’s Death From Above 1979. It’s not going to change the world for us. It’s like working out or running on a treadmill in a sense, you know? Like you’re not going anywhere, but it feels good!

Are you playing this album start to end on this tour?
Yeah! We’ve done it now in every territory other than South America and Australia. So yeah, this is going to be the last time we do it was going to be down there for y’all. Then we get to play other songs again!

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Death From Above 1979 on the following dates, tickets from Teamwrk Touring…