From ‘Whatever’ To What’s Next Hot Chelle Rae Fire Up For 2026

American Music Award winners Hot Chelle Rae are in the country making their highly anticipated return to Australia for the inaugural alternative event An Emo Extravaganza and also a limited run of headline shows. Best known for their triple-platinum smash Tonight Tonight and Top 40 belter I Like It Like That, Hot Chelle Rae rose to global prominence with their 2011 sophomore album Whatever. The band spent years refining their live show touring alongside the likes of Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, and Justin Bieber, cementing their reputation as one of the era’s most undeniable pop-rock acts. Following a period focused on song writing and creative growth, Hot Chelle Rae have recently returned reenergised, armed with new material and a renewed appreciation for the songs that made them household names. For Australian fans, these headline shows promise a trip down memory lane. Rob Lyon talks to Nash Overstreet and Jamie Follesé about the tour.

Your Australian tour is on us now, you must be excited about returning?
Nash: Oh man, I cannot tell you, we are so in love with being in Australia. It’s always been like a top country, so this is a great tour to get. When we heard we were doing it, we just lost it. It’s really exciting.

To be touring with like Cartel, Anberlin, This Wildlife must make it a whole bunch of fun as well?
Nash: Oh, for sure.

Jamie: It’s really going to be a huge throwback tour and I was telling Nash earlier, I don’t even know if he remembered this, but we played with Cartel in 2010, I think . They’re the only ones we’ve actually played with before, but it’s just so crazy that we have such a history with them and it’s just going to be such a fun tour for us and we love Australia.

It must set the year up for you guys in a really positive way as well to be on such a tour like this combined with Emo Extravaganza over East?
Nash: Yeah and there’s a lot of action online, people are stoked. They’re clearly thrilled that the tour’s coming over there and it’s wild to see the actual same fans that saw us open for like Taylor Swift over there or saw us on our headlining thing when we took Five Seconds Of Summer out for their first tour. Like, these people are just losing their minds. They’re still there, they’re ready to go crazy at the show and I can’t wait to see what it feels like. I think Australian fans have always been the loudest, wildest ones.

Does it feel like a holiday as well, playing some shows, enjoy everything there is about Australia in our summer and it has been hot?
Nash: You’re cooking! We’ve never done summer in Australia, so I don’t know if we’re ready for the heat other than this last summer we played Okinawa in Japan and it was maybe like 105 Fahrenheit outdoors.

What is it that you miss about touring Australia? I know I’ve seen on Facebook it was all about kangaroo tattoos or something — is it in Perth or something?
Nash: I tried to get a tattoo in Adelaide while we were on the tour with Five Seconds of Summer. We had a month in Australia and I was talking about this tattoo and I went to a parlour in Adelaide and they were like, yeah, we can get you in in five days. I’m like, well, I fly out tomorrow morning, so that’s not happening. I kept trying and failing and finally the last show of the tour, we were leaving at night immediately after the show to Malaysia and I went to dinner, I stopped by this tattoo parlour on the way to the concert and I was like, can you guys do a tattoo real quick? They’re like, yeah, sure. We got time. So I had this sticker that somebody had given me of a Kangaroo Crossing sign, and I got that tattooed on my ankle, went and played the show, flew out that night.

The tour is all about the Whatever album — that in itself has built an incredible legacy over time. That must make you feel really humble that the album still has such an impact and resonates so strongly with a lot of people, including a younger group of fans coming through now?
Jamie: Yeah, there’s a, there’s a lot of songs on that album that we haven’t gotten to play in a long time and it’s going to be really nice. There’s a lot of people that have requested that we play quite a few songs from that album that we just have kind of fallen by the wayside over time and we’re just really excited to get to play those. Honestly, the fans in Australia are the best fans that we have maybe anywhere in the world. So it’s going to be a special experience.

It sounds like you guys should move here?
Nash: I think so.

Jamie: We might, you don’t have to tell us twice.

Nash: Yeah, cancel that return ticket!

How do you find playing the album start to end? Is that the plan on this tour, or do you mix it up or reorder things after thinking about it for many years?
Nash: Yeah, so we’re going to mix it up for sure because we’ve got tons of songs that have come out since then that the fans love as well. We released an EP in 2020. We’ve got a new album coming out, we’ve got a couple singles that we released right after Whatever. But the full album being the focus part of the set, I think the coolest part is it’s forcing us to play songs that I think we truly love playing, but we’ve been lazy in the past. Like, let’s act this out , we’re in the dressing room, we’re picking a set. I’m like, Jamie, what song should we play? I don’t know, Unstoppable, it’s like a fan favourite. They love it. Jamie, what would you say?

Jamie: I would say I’m scared and I don’t wanna mess anything up and so let’s just play what we know .

Nash: So this is great. It keeps us raising the bar of remembering all the songs we’ve ever played and recorded and making it the actual core of the tour is great. I cannot wait to play these songs and bring them back to life and then play the favourites that we play every single show obviously like Tonight Tonight, I Like It Like That. It’s going to be really interesting to see what songs hit the hardest.

Do some of those songs come back through muscle memory, or do they take quite a bit of practice to nail in a way you’d be happy to play live?
Nash: So Jamie doesn’t even know this because this is a very specific internal thing that I had to deal with tech-wise, but when I was like resurrecting all these tracks, because we have a lot of synthesizer tracks that will trigger with a keyboard to fill out the live show, I was pulling up these stems from the original recordings and a song called Keep You With Me, there are a couple versions of some of our songs and obviously only one was ever released and the audience only knows one. But when we wrote these songs, sometimes we wrote a different verse. Usually the second verse.

Jamie: Oh.

Nash: That is when muscle memory gets tricky because part of your muscle memory is how you wrote the song. The other part is the released one and I found both verses in the file and I was like, which one was it that actually came out? I had to go look on Spotify to remember the proper lyrics for the second verse.

Wow. That’s an insight for sure.
Nash: So there, yeah the song writing game of how it gets finished the day of versus how it gets finished when it’s a record can be very different.

Do you still remember when that album came out, and particular moments that still stand out for you?
Nash: Yeah, I mean it being a CD was a lot more impactful because we got to hold it, see it, open it, all that.

Jamie: Yeah, I remember that and I think was it New Year’s going into 2012, we got to do the Rockin’ New Year’s in Times Square and I kind of always think about that every New Year’s, just because that was such a special experience and kind of like a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It was super amazing.

Nash: Yeah, it was a special experience for you. I brought a date and all she wanted me to do was take a picture of her and Bieber.

Jamie: I don’t even remember that!

Nash: I did not date her. I did not date her anymore!

Ouch! But were you ever prepared for how much things would change being thrown into the limelight?
Nash: It’s a good question. I think it’s really hard to notice how much it’s changed when you’re in it. I think you’re just in a hurry to try to sleep for three hours before you fly somewhere. You’re trying to get to a meet and greet before the show. You’re trying to do a photo shoot or write a new song or make a new album and the second you take a break or go on a vacation and realise what you’ve done recently, it’s a big kind of mind trip. So I don’t think it was tough to adjust because we just did what we needed to do. But it’s really a cool thing to see videos and throwback moments and even the 2016 trend going on social media that made me go look at my old photos. I was like, oh, I forgot all these moments that have happened and they happened so crazy fast. So I don’t think anybody ever takes the time to really soak it in, it’s almost impossible to do it. But once that life kind of just happens to you, you’re in it and you better keep up and hold on because it’s really out of your control.

Talking about the new album, how is that shaping up?
Nash: Yeah, the album’s done. We are finalising plans for releasing it. The whole vibe is just nothing serious, nothing slow, nothing sad. It is fun, it’s us to a tee. It’s got all of the kind of sassy energy of what Hot Chelle Rae is and why our fans love us. We’ve got some rhythms and grooves of that late nineties alternative band vibe and that Sugar Ray / Blur / Third Eye Blind space. We’ve got some of that snarky angst of the Blink-182 era. But all of the album’s done with acoustic guitars. So if you imagine a pop-punk guitar riff, it’s been done on an acoustic, might have some distortion on it, but we just wanted to come up with this new way to paint a photo musically of all these really cool eras that inspired us mixed with our own successes we’ve had.

Did anything in particular influence that, or is that just how things evolved?
Nash: There was just a day when I think we decided let’s make an album with a very specific target. Let’s decide here’s the attitude, here’s the feeling, it’s going to be fun. It’s a lot of autobiographical moments of first coming to LA and getting wrapped up in that lifestyle like you’re talking about. And then this moment of how do we make it new and different while being familiar came to this thing of just do it on acoustics. Do something that’s been done, people know it, they love this chord progression or this feel, but it hasn’t been done this way.

Jamie: Yeah, I think it really benefits from, especially the drum sounds and particular sounds that we used are really helping to bring it to this time and meld the older sound with the new stuff that we really love.

Awesome, are we likely to see that this year or later in the year?
Nash: Yes, we will have some type of release date very soon and I love that the album’s just finished because that’s the hardest part . So once that’s done, just got to get a calendar out.

All that means is you have to come back even sooner now that that’s done.
Nash: I’ll come back monthly. You set it up, I’ll jump on the plane . I’m down for it easy.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Hot Chelle Rae on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…

And at Emo Extravaganza, tickets from Destroy All Lines…