A Young Person’s Guide To King Parrot…

A Young Person’s Guide To King Parrot is the rotten fruit at the bottom of your lunch bag on a warm day of an album. An offensive smell of putrid stench which is everything you know and love about Melbourne’s crudest outfit, King Parrot, and it lands on June 6.

In the meantime, the band are scaring the locals across the East Coast and Tasmania before embarking on a mammoth American tour with friends Pantera. In fact, since my last conversation with Matt ‘Youngy’ Young in November, the band had just finished touring America with Pantera, went through Australia twice, headed to Europe – again with Pantera – finished an album and changed drummer. They haven’t forgotten Adelaide, ‘We’re just saving the best for last’, Youngy placates me.

‘It’s been great, we did the big European run with Pantera and Power Trip, and then we did a whole bunch of club shows as well with Master, which was amazing, and just an unforgettable experience getting to do all that stuff. Towards the end of the tour, we made the decision that we were going to move on from our old drummer and we got a new drummer, Max Dangerfield, who’s been with us now for a couple months, and that’s been going great. Just sort of came time that we changed it up a bit because we’ve been working with Todd for such a long time. He’s been up in Brisbane, he lives up there and we’ve been trying to make it work and we just bought it up and decided that it was best to go our own way, amicably and all that sort of stuff.’

‘We’ve got someone down here in Melbourne now, and Max is awesome and a great drummer. We’re just powering on and we’ve done a couple shows already with Max, which has been great! Townsville and Mackay this weekend then next weekend we’ve got Tasmania with Pyscroptic, which is going to be incredible. Then the weeks after that we’ve got some Victorian shows, we’ve got some Sydney and we play up Thrashville Festival up near Newcastle. So, yeah, and don’t worry, Adelaide’s coming.’

The band’s recording process with Luke Walton as engineer was different from previously, with the challenge to bottle the lightning that is so often the band’s energy live onto a record. The result is ten tracks of dirty, filthy, antagonistic array of blast beats, grooves and snarling vocals that has overflown from the gutter beneath. There will be review of the album in the coming days however for now, some songs have been aired live for keen observers such Fuck You And The Horse Your Rode In On.

‘We had that one and we also had ‘Get What You’re Given’, and we’ve been playing those live for a little while. It had been so long since we’d done a record and recorded, so we wanted to just start road testing those songs and playing them live. We felt and knew that those songs were going to work in the live setting. We could tell we’ve been doing it long enough, we can tell which ones are going to work. So those two for us really stood out and yeah, we’ve been playing ’em live for a little bit now.’

Other songs have been getting a workout on this run such as Punish The Runt which has a solo that makes you screw your face up and nod in approval.

‘I’ll let Squiz know! There’s a bunch that we’re working on. We’re working the last song ‘Pissing On The Fist Of The Law.’ That’s a fun one. It’s funny when you go in and record and you know the song so well and then finish the recording, so we’ve been revisiting the songs again just to relearn ’em. Obviously we’ve got a different drummer now, so we kind of have to relearn ’em with Max too, so it brings another element to it. It’s been so much fun just to be out there and do it again, having new songs in the set to play. We’ve got this new kind of energy that’s happening in the band at the moment that’s really, really cool that we haven’t felt in a long time. I mean Max is twenty four, so he brings some youthful exuberance and I’m like, this is sick. We can keep going for another twenty years at least!’

Max Dangerfield is quite the accomplished drummer himself in the Melbourne scene with Goat Shaman and manning mixing desks at Singing Bird Studios in Frankston. Apart from the exuberance of youth, he does bring his own style to the band’s shit smearing sound.

‘Max has got a lot of swing and a lot of groove, I think a part of our formula has always been to fall back into the groove of the swing and the feel of the riffs as well as have all those intense blast beats and crazy parts that we are known for. That dynamic has always been a big part of the band, and that’s one of Max’s real strengths. The new songs have taken on a different sort of feel. I mean, they’re still obviously totally identifiable, but for us, when we look at everything under a magnifying glass, we’re the ones that are writing it, recording it, listening to every little nuance of every song. So with this, it feels more natural for us and it feels really good. It’s exciting to get this record out, but I’m just ready to do another one straight away. I’m ready to go. I want to do another one.’

Pissing On The Fist Of The Law is actually a slower doomer track for King Parrot, however it’s Glazed & Diseased In Defeat that raises a few eyebrows with its sonic spiraling sound and raw emotional content that is a departure from the rest of the album.

‘Lyrically that song is about alcoholism, there’s some aspects of it that are about homelessness and stuff. There’s a bit of that sort of stuff going on outside of the band. I work in drug and alcohol rehab, so that stuff’s very close to my heart. I’ve been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for over thirteen years, been clean and sober over 13 years now, so that stuff is very close to me. So that song broaches on that stuff. So that’s probably why it kind of maybe sounds a little bit more emotional.’

The band are not going soft though. They are calling things as they see it, they feel it and this album is how they express it.

‘We play the music that we play, call it grindcore, call it thrash, whatever you want to call it. We try not to pigeonhole ourselves too much, but I think essentially we are what we are, right? There’s definitely these punk rock undertones to everything that we’ve always done. I’m not into politics or anything like that really, but when shit’s as stupid as it’s been over the last however many years, it’s kind of hard not to have that seep in. So I try and stand back a lot from it and I’m not taking any sides or anything like that. It’s just like ‘this is bullshit’. I’m sure many people can relate to that.’

We finish the interview with a nod to the title of the album, and its creator.

‘This is actually a pretty sad story, so brace yourself. But in 2023, one of my very best friends passed away, and his name’s Boyd Synnott, and he was the sixth member of King Parrot and a huge contributor to the band. He did the artwork to the two eps we’ve done. He’s done countless merch designs, posters, all that sort of stuff for us. He’s in that ‘Shit On The Liver’ video. He’s the parking inspector. He passed away under tragic circumstances back in 2023 and before he passed, he’d actually done this artwork already and he just wrote a ‘Young Person’s Guide to King Parrot’ and it was a bit of a tip of the hat to the old seventies prog band King Crimson. He just thought that was great and goes this should be the next album cover. I always kept it and I always thought maybe, yeah, why not? It’s got to be this one.’

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch King Parrot on the following tour dates, tickets HERE…