The Rubens On Group Therapy

Fifteen years into an extraordinary career, one that’s yielded five ARIA Top 5 albums and a myriad of Gold and Platinum era-defining singles, Aussie alt-rock icons The Rubens now enter an exciting new chapter with the announcement of their sixth studio album, Group Therapy, alongside an extensive national tour set to take them to every corner of the country. Spanning regional centres and capital cities alike, the mammoth tour will see the band connect with audiences across Australia as they celebrate their most ambitious and emotionally resonant body of work yet. Off the back of their forthcoming album, Group Therapy, The Rubens are thrilled to be heading out on a massive tour, bringing their big live sound, catchy hooks and feel-good tunes to every corner of the country. Brothers Sam and Elliott Margin talk to Rob Lyon about the album and tour.

Great to be talking to you both. Congratulations on the new album, fantastic.
Sam: Thank you.

Are you feeling relieved, excited that it’s finally out?
Sam: Yeah, I think… yeah, it’s always a bit of both. Relieved that things that we’ve been working on for so long, and been holding onto for so long, can finally be heard by fans, and excited to get on the road. I mean, that’s always the fun bit, right? Just getting out and playing shows.

How do you go with that limbo phase from now until the album comes out? Is that the last chance you get to enjoy your songs before they become everybody else’s songs?
Elliott: Kind of. I feel also, because the process can be so dragged out, we won’t run the risk of becoming detached from the songs, because it’s been so long. Just recently, Sam and I have been going back and writing blurbs for the songs on the record, and I reckon that’s the hardest, it’s harder than writing the songs, writing about the songs, because you spent so much time away from them, and then you have to sit there and put yourself back in the shoes of where you were when you wrote it. So we’re kind of in a weird limbo phase of sitting on the music that we worked really, really hard on. And getting it out there, I’m just keen for people to hear it, really. I’d rather put it out sooner.

Has how you feel about the songs changed since they were originally finished, given that you’ve been sitting on them for a while?
Elliott: Different favourites kind of pop up for me when we go back and listen. No regrets, though. I think honestly, we’re all probably more pro, I don’t know if it’s just recency bias, but we’re all more proud of this one than maybe any of our albums. We worked very, very hard on it. We made a lot of decisions in the studio that we’re very proud of, and the sound of the record as a whole, I think we’re very proud of, and the songs themselves.

Sam: It’s also like, you get the whole record mixed, mastered, listen to it once, everyone… the group chat goes off, “Yeah, sounds awesome guys, well done” and then a few months go by while we’re getting all the wheels in motion to go on tour and release the thing, making music videos, doing all the other stuff that goes along with a record. Then we’ve all come back to listening to the actual record again recently and been pleasantly surprised, you know? Because you never know, once you take a little break from something you’ve spent so much time on, you never know if you’re going to come back and wish you’d done something differently. But yeah, I’m super stoked with how it turned out.

I think what is quite striking is how cohesive a record it is, start to end. It must have made it really difficult picking that first single, because potentially you could have gone with any of them.
Sam: I’m glad you said cohesive, because we feel like we’re almost known for throwing curveballs on records, and having songs that maybe sit slightly outside of the genre. I’m really glad you feel that way, because Goanna… it was a considered choice. We knew that putting Goanna out first was… we didn’t want to set people’s expectations that that was going to be the tempo of the record, and that you could boogie to every song. But it was also like… I like to keep people guessing. The way we were hoping to keep that cohesion on the record, because there are songs that feel a little bit more skewed towards the country sort of vibes, or some straight‑up Americana rock and roll, was more about the sounds we used and the way we recorded it. That was always in the back of our mind: how do we get this group of songs that we love individually and make it feel like an album that makes sense from start to finish? So I’m glad you feel that way.

Listening to the first couple of songs, I thought it might take a bit to get into, but it’s one of those you’ve just got to see through to the end. What sort of albums were you listening to for inspiration on this one?
Elliott: That’s a good question. We had a playlist that we would reference in the studio when we were actually recording, just to give us guide maps for how we wanted the album to sound sonically. I think there was maybe a little bit of early Coldplay in there, I think maybe Parachutes. That was, I think, in terms of how we dealt with drums. Getting live drum sounds and sounds in the room was important to us. What else were we listening to?

Sam: I can’t remember… I know there was definitely a lot of early Coldplay, and it’s not because they nailed it, it was just a reference to a specific way of approaching drums that wasn’t heavy‑handed. We wanted to have big moments in songs land in a way that felt big, but if you actually listen to the drums and what’s going on, we’re not overdoing it. Same with the guitars, everything comes together to make a moment feel huge, but it’s not a wall of sound. We’ve found in the past that when we’ve tried to make a heavy, large, big dramatic moment in a rock and roll song sound big, we throw everything at it and end up with eight tracks of electric guitars all fighting against each other, and that ends up making it feel small. We’ve learnt over making records over the last fifteen years little tricks and tips here and there, and that was one thing we were trying to work out how to achieve, less is more, everything has its place, and not just trying to throw more and more at the problem, maybe trying to take things away, if anything.

When you mentioned the Americana influence, is that just something that the music just evolved that way?
Sam: I think some things come down to instrumentation. You know, a jangly acoustic guitar is gonna sort of point you in a certain direction. We’ve always been inspired, like, I personally have always loved the blues and stuff like that as well, so we were definitely, in our early days, inspired by the more modern blues revival bands, kind of like the Black Keys and stuff, so it’s always been there. I think that’s kind of where we started as a band. It was definitely that kind of influence, and we’ve come back around to that, I guess, in the instrumentation. So I think it’s never left, but when we were making decisions in the studio on which direction to take an idea, rather than throwing a synthesizer or something in there, we were like, alright, let’s get an acoustic, or a twelve‑string, or an electric guitar, and it kind of ends up pushing it in that direction.

Was it clear in your own mind where you wanted to go with this particular album?
Elliott: Sort of. Now that I think about it, we had quite a few songs, almost to the point where we did talk about maybe doing two albums, because we could have split them down the middle and had, alright, this side could be maybe a little bit more based around the acoustic guitar, maybe even a little bit more country‑esque in a way, and then other things that are maybe a little bit more modern pop. We kind of scrapped that idea in the beginning, before we jumped into the studio, because we realized that with every record we make, we want to make sure that we’re putting our best foot forward with the songs that we have. So it’s about finding what are the strongest songs here, and then making them cohesive. I think that was kind of the decision from the get‑go. We definitely wanted to lean more back into guitars, just because that’s the type of music that we were writing, and that’s what, to our ear, was exciting. Again, like Sam said, we started out basing most of the songwriting around guitars in the early years, and then dabbled a little bit more in synths and crazy pedals and things and other instruments. This was more a considered effort to making it sound like a band with guitars playing in the room together, kind of, was the direction.

Sam: I think we gave ourselves certain constraints as well. We didn’t make rules that we had to follow, but we did talk about the fact that on this record, we didn’t want to sound‑replace drum sounds, for example. On most records you hear these days, the drums are performed by a drummer, but then the kick and the snare are changed and replaced to suit the song and to make it easier to mix and sound better on commercial radio, etc. So we did sort of put constraints on ourselves, and we wanted to make sure that the drum sounds that we got in the studio were gonna be the ones that we have to live with forever. So it just meant taking more time in the setup, thinking about what snare’s gonna suit what’s happening in the rest of this specific song, and then getting that right. So I think that kind of also, just giving ourselves a few somewhat rules of how we were gonna record this, dictated the end product a little bit.

Did the songs come fairly easily?
Elliott: I think so. I think we’re in the habit now, we’re six albums in, that we never really stop writing. So it’s not like we sit down and say, alright, now time to begin the next album. We’ll put a record out, and we’ll be touring whatever the most recent record is, and in the meantime we’re still writing songs, so we’re still collecting songs. Like, we’re still writing right now for whatever record comes next, which is a nice way to keep the pressure off. We’re never saying, alright, begin, what’s your best idea, go for this next record. We’re just kind of collecting little gems here and there, like a magpie.

Did you realise, as it was starting to come together in the studio, that you had a particularly special group of songs? Or was it recorded over a longer period of time and it was just a matter of working out which songs fit together the best?
Sam: I think there’s always a shitload of quality songs in that Dropbox folder. Elliott’s always writing, he writes a lot more than I do these days, so there’s always quality in there. I’m never worried about the quality of songs we have access to in that Dropbox folder, and I know that when the rest of the band get together and we do our thing with our co‑producer, Con, they’re going to turn into something different and something better. So I was never worried that we didn’t have the songs.

I think maybe the decisions we had to make were… you know, say we were choosing from twenty and wanted to bring it down to ten or eleven, it was just making sure that because they’re all as good as each other, it’s more about what’s gonna make the record work. We didn’t want to double up on songs, if there was already a song doing something and serving a purpose, we didn’t want another one that sounded too similar. So there was that process, and then also what kind of journey do we want to take people on? Do we have a ballad? Are we missing something that might slow everything down for a bit? Or are we missing something way more energetic? And that’s sort of how we ended up whittling down the longer list to the short list.

Is there a deeper meaning behind the album title Group Therapy?
Elliott: There’s a few kind of threads of meaning for us. This is probably the first time, I think, that during the recording of the record, we found the title of the record. I think it might have been halfway through or towards the end. For us, it’s always the hardest thing, like, we finish an album, and then we sit down and go, alright, what do we name this thing? This time it kind of came about because of us thinking about what music is for us, in a way. It being a kind of therapeutic thing, something that we always come back to, something that… you know, it’s also our livelihood. It puts food on our table, but it’s also something we’d do even if it didn’t do that. For us, kind looking at music in a way where it’s like, hey, it’s this thing that we come together and do as a group. It’s also a thing that people come together and listen to as a group. People go to live shows, or go to the club and dance to music. It’s this big thing that you’re not necessarily analysing, and the good that it can do for you, but it’s there in your life, and it’s there in our lives. Broadly, that’s the meaning for us behind the title.

What were you reactions to the finished version?
Sam: We’re always in different places. I guess we spend that much time together that when we’re not on tour or in the studio, we’re with our respective families and whatnot. So the final master got sent through to our group chat, it’s how things go these days and everyone listened and then fired off in the group chat saying how happy we were. It’s kind of how things go these days. We’ve gotten together to listen… I mean, we’ve spent so much time listening to these songs together, but we are going to do some listening parties and stuff, so I guess that’ll be the first time where we’ll actually listen to it in the same room from start to finish with each other as well.

Going on the road are you looking to play the album in full, or at least a good slab of it?
Sam: Good slab of it, not in full. We don’t want to ask too much of our audience, we understand they’ve got five other albums they want to hear some bits and pieces from. But yeah, I reckon we’ll play a good… nearly half of the record we’ll play. This is the first tour after the record comes out, and you learn a lot from touring a new album. You learn that maybe certain songs you thought were going to be crowd favourites aren’t crowd favourites, they don’t fall flat, but they’re just not doing what you thought they might do. Over the course of the next few years, we’ll probably realise that there’s certain songs we didn’t realise were going to turn out to be favourites, and the set list will change. So we have to guess at this point what people are going to want to hear, because they haven’t even heard the record yet. So we just pick the songs that we feel like will translate live, and then hope that we get it right.

It must be hard with so many great songs, so many singles. It’s a nice challenge to have now when it comes to doing a tour set list?
Elliott: Yeah, it’s a big job. It’s a big job. Also, pretty much every time, different band members will have different songs as their favourites, and that’s when it comes down to democracy, voting what we get in there and what falls by the wayside. There are still songs we’ve never played live as a band because we all agree we don’t want to play them live, and then there are other ones that we argue about. It’s funny, because early on in our career, when you’ve only got, say, our debut record out we have to play every song we’ve ever written on a tour, because we’ve got an eleven‑song album, maybe with some bonus tracks or something. That’s our set, and it’s a short set. So those early records, we had to learn how to play or play a live version of most of our material. Then as you add records to the catalogue, we no longer have to. I reckon album number three coming out, maybe, we were like, holy shit, this is such a luxury, we don’t have to play everything we’ve ever written. We can start to craft a set and leave songs out. Now we’re at a point where, yeah, on this record, there’s definitely going to be songs that we’ll never have to relearn how to play, and they’ll always just exist online. You’ll never see us play them live.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Rubens on the following dates, tickets HERE...