Features

After releasing two EP's in the formative years of the band, "Sentimental Health" and "Teenage Séance", Regionals have taken four years to experiment and develop their sound culminating in a body of work that best represents themselves and their world view on debut album ‘Spoonbender’.

Regionals are a band who exist on the margins. The margins of introspection and belligerence, the margins of intensity and subtlety, the margins of being present, but never really there. "This is the band’s truest form", states Regionals singer/guitarist Brett Islaub when discussing the band’s debut album ‘Spoonbender’.

Born from darkness, isolation induced agoraphobia and an unhealthy dose of self-reflection, ‘Spoonbender’ marks a more extreme and experimental course for the Sydney-based band. Recorded during the winter of 2023 at Parliament studios with Lachlan Mitchell (The Jezabels, The Laurels, Totally Unicorn) and mixed & mastered by Mark Perry (Deafcult), the band succeeded in reshaping their sound, whilst adding in the light & shade of lush, atmospheric textures and jangly guitars with the abrasive attack of heavy guitars and vocal screams.

We caught up with the band's Brett Islaub and Aaron Costello who were kind enough to walk us through their debut album.

About the album

Brett: For me Spoonbender is the record I am proudest of to date across any record I’ve been a part of. Representing a darker point of view has always been where I’ve been trying to get to lyrically but maybe haven’t been ready to in some way but I feel like there were a lot of lessons learned in the making of Spoonbender that has slightly changed any fear of misrepresentation into a want to be more direct.

It wasn’t an easy record to make but there were moments of brightness in experimentation and Lachlan really helped to allow that. Like every Regionals record the mixing phase causes severe anxiety but the collective vision of where we were headed and how we wanted to change kept the path relatively well lit along the way.

Aaron: Spoonbender was written across 2020-2023 and after rushing to write and record our first 2 releases as a new band, this was the first time we actually took the time to write a bigger batch of songs, complete pre-production in our home studios and to put a lot more effort & thought into crafting a cohesive album.

This was also the first time we’ve written and recorded as a band with 3 guitarists which enabled us to create more layers in the songs and embrace our heavy shoegaze influences. There was also time for a lot more experimentation and every song on the record features additional instrumentation such as synths, pianos/keys, drum machines & samples. As always, I can’t count how many different guitar pedals were used on the record.

There was also a conscious effort in the writing process for this album to simplify the song structures from our earlier releases, without completely losing what makes a Reggies song. We can mostly define which parts a verse or a chorus on these songs and certain parts of the songs even happen more than once. This is restraint & perhaps even progress for us.

We recorded the album with Lachlan Mitchell (The Jezabels, The Vines, Motor Ace) at Parliament Studios in Sydney over 2 weeks in August 2023 and it was mixed by Mark Perry (Deafcult) in Brisbane in early 2024.

Sour Ground

Brett: I would say this is probably my personal favourite song on the record and I feel really sets the darker tone in sound that we were looking to accomplish on Spoonbender overall. This was written towards the beginning of writing sessions for the album and was initially planned as an instrumental along with “Eye” from memory. The music was floating around for a while before I found myself humming a melody that I thought would fit and then it just became one of those situations where the lyrics and melody were finished in a matter of minutes once I got going. It just kind of flew out. This song was initially just going to have the drum machine in it all the way through but in pre-production for the album sessions Tim Hansen who played drums on the record for us came up with that tom section that we felt really built the back end of the song. Lyrically this song is kind of a mix of personal reflection based on isolation induced anxiety overlaid with fictional lines based on content I was watching at the time.  

Spoonbender

Brett: This was the first song that was demoed by Aaron for the album. Aaron will write a full working demo and then share with the band to add/learn their parts to and then I will normally write lyrics and melodies somewhere along that process. I know from Aaron’s perspective that writing this song was the catalyst that confirmed that he was going to be able to write in a darker direction. From my perspective I feel like this song is the perfect bridge between this record and our previous work as I feel it encapsulates elements of both which made it the best song to lead off the album with after the Sour Ground intro. I remember sitting in the drum room with Tim while he did his first few takes of this song and he was just beating the shit out of his kit and I immediately knew this song was going to work.

291

Brett: 291 is mostly a song about a dream. It’s a reference to an inside joke between Aaron and I that we’ll never tell. We feel like this song is the best representation of the band we have wanted to be since the previous release. Having Vetty lend her voice really finished the song for me, felt like the missing piece. One of the first songs demo’d for Spoonbender back in 2020 the song has had many iterations but like I said, probably the best representation of Regionals to date.

Aaron: This track was built on a jangly, heavily delayed guitar riff that is a complete nod to my love of Johnny Marr’s guitar playing, but the track is nothing like a Smiths song. When Brett first layed down the demo vocals for this track and started screaming in the chorus, it completely changed the direction of this track and ultimately the whole record. It was one of the moments in song writing where something unexpected clicks everything into place. This track is great representation of where Regionals are at right now, the verses are dreamy and lush, but the chorus hits you in the face.

Happiness For Bastards

Brett: Another song that was in the first batch of demos Aaron shared with the band for the record and is probably the most reserved song on the record (bridge not included). This was a really fun song to record based on all of the various guitar parts and how much experimentation we did with pedals on each of the guitar track where we basically used every reverb and delay pedal we either owned or could find in Parliament Studios. I believe this was the first song that we tracked screaming vocals for so was a nice experimentation for me on if I could actually pull that off in a recording setting. Like Sour Ground lyrically this song is very much a mix of personal experience alongside references to books I was reading at the time (a lot of Stephen King and Murakami) as well as the show “Dark”.

Doom Loop

Brett: Easily the heaviest song the band has ever done when I first heard this demo I knew that Aaron and I were on the same wavelength in terms of where we wanted the record to go. It took forever for us to get the melody in the verses right alongside the guitar lines as they kept clashing with what I had written so Lachlan (Mitchell – engineer and owner of Parliament Studios) was really helpful in breaking all of the parts of this song out and showing us what was clashing and why and then working through what would work for the section and how we could change the melody to fit the guitars we had already recorded.  I distinctly remember Tim and Aaron doing the feedback loops for this song in the amp room at Parliament and it being SO loud that Aaron looked completely dazed and out of it when he came back into the control room based on the sheer volume we were recording at.

Eye

Brett: If our band was to ever score a horror film (open to invitations by the way!) this is how I think it would sound. This is a perfect example of what each guitarist in the band brings to a song where Aaron drives the song with his mainline that is usually really clean and precise and then that is coloured by Tim who really accents and brings the emotion out of the mainline with his additions and then I come in towards the end in complete chaos with the fuzz lines to drive the dynamics at the end. We thought this particular instrumental was a nice way to break up side A and B of the vinyl release. The quote you hear at the end was taken from a cab ride we all took after a show in Brisbane where the driver was telling us all manor of insane stories. One of which involved a gang member getting into his cab only to have a rival gang member also jump in and cut off the other guys thumb, I have no idea why I decided to start recording on my phone but am so glad I did.

Rotator

Brett: A song that almost didn’t make it on the record actually so a nice example of finish writing the song no matter what cos I had basically given up on this one. Aaron had the music ready for quite a while and I just couldn’t find the melody on it until one day during the album session it just was there and once we started it just kinda flowed and all came together.

Aaron: Rotator was a song that was bound for the cutting room floor until the vocals were finished at the 11th hour and made the song what it is. Instrumentally, this song is probably the most similar to the tracks on our ‘Teenage Séance’ EP and is a nice link between our last record, which was 4 years ago, and this one. We may have created 2 versions of this song, but you’ll have to buy the record to find out if that’s true.

Dialect

Brett: Dialect was heavily inspired by the band drop nineteens where they have these beautiful loops that just seem to play over and over however the structure of the song changes based on the vocals and accompanying instruments. We had so many different ideas for the drum loop on this song and we worked through it with Tim in pre-production but Lachlan suggested the loop be simplified to what it is now and we all realised that it works perfectly the way it is. So much so that we all had that drum loop stuck in our heads for days after it was tracked. This song also features Vetty Vials again from a vocal perspective and I just love her performances on our record. They were exactly what I hoped they’d be.

Wax/Wane

Brett: This is one of my favourite choruses ever. I just love the way the verse opens up into this big wide chorus and I struggled for quite a while to find the right melody but as always realised that keeping it simple was more effective than trying to do anything overly layered. This song was earmarked to finish the record pretty early on but it wasn’t until we finished the long outro with all of the additional instrument which devolves into chaos that we realised it absolutely had to be the last song. Purely autobiographical from a lyrical standpoint this is a song about just feeling completely out of place in every environment and not understanding where you fit and how that dysphoria effects every element of life.