Spacey Jane - If That Makes Sense Tour

‘All The Noise’ — the first single from Spacey Jane’s third album, If That Makes Sense — sets the stage for the quartet’s most accomplished and ambitious collection to date. Written in one session and jammed out in soundcheck, ‘All The Noise’ is immediate and epic. It sees frontman, Caleb Harper, piecing together the story of his parents’ union and collapse as he is backed by a central riff that tumbles in propulsive triplets, hooks like a chorus, and rushes towards moments of space and respite.

Communication, in whatever form that takes, is a leap of faith, and on If That Makes Sense, Caleb’s trademark mode of lyrical honesty is honed to its finest point, his vulnerability revealing profound strength. It is an album that parses the big stuff: heartbreak and longing; how the past can prefigure the future; the gulf between what’s been said and what’s been done; rewriting the script. It’s the sound of a band breaking new ground. But the beauty of art is that it serves a purpose for those who make it, while offering itself up for interpretation entirely divorced from its creators. What the listener takes from Spacey Jane is for the listener alone to divine.

Formed in Perth, Western Australia, in 2016 while Caleb, drummer Kieran Lama, and guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu were still at university — with bassist/backing vocalist Peppa Lane joining in 2020 — Spacey Jane built a dedicated following the old school way, by tirelessly gigging. After releasing a couple of frenetic, scuzzy indie-rock EPs, the band’s debut full-length, Sunlight, dropped in June 2020, connecting instantly, and topping Triple J’s annual album poll with breakout single ‘Booster Seat’ scooping ARIA Song of the Year. 

The swift success buoyed the quartet’s confidence. Caleb recalls when the band began writing their 2022 follow-up, Here Comes Everybody, “we sort of had our tails up, roostering a little bit, like ‘We can fucking do this!’” — and their conviction saw them through. Their sophomore album debuted at number one on the ARIA charts, and in 2022 they were Triple J’s most played artist. Overall worldwide streams currently clock in at 518 million, not to mention sold out tours cementing their formidable live reputation (in 2023 they shifted 28k tickets from headlining shows alone).

In just a few short years, Spacey Jane established themselves as one of Australia’s hottest homegrown talents, so it stands to reason that the band are broadening their horizons. Determined to push out of their creative comfort zone, If That Makes Sense began with Caleb coming to Los Angeles and challenging himself with the rigorous songwriting speed dating that’s become part of the LA’s music scene, an experience he describes as “fucking terrifying.” 

Relocating so far from home and feeling “like a fish out of water” resulted in Caleb really questioning himself: “Am I reinventing myself, or just trying to dig down to the person that I am in this pretty weird environment? You can either be overwhelmed or take advantage of that.” Embracing that discomfort offered breakthroughs with new collaborators like Jackson “Day Wave” Phillips and Sarah Aarons (Lykke Li, Childish Gambino, Miley Cyrus).

Another notable break in Spacey Jane’s standard process is that, with this album, they allowed themselves the liberty of time. Rather than an album coming together in a matter of weeks, amid constant touring, on If That Makes Sense, the band simply kept writing and writing. Whittling down from nearly 40 songs, spanning almost a year of intermittent pre-production sessions, the band eventually convened in LA for eight weeks of pre-production, before heading to the studio with producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, Wolf Alice, The 1975) for 12 weeks of recording. The time and space to play together resulted in new textural elements to their work, with the band swapping out some guitars for synths, tweaking the drum tones, and running all 13 tracks through tape to achieve the “warm rounded tones” that permeate the project. 

Of the process Caleb recalls, “I think we needed to feel uncomfortable and unsure of ourselves to truly question what we were making and how to make it better.”

With its opening brooding synth, and soaring melodies steeped in melancholy, ‘Whateverrrr’ became the record’s jumping off point, a song Caleb describes as “a wound”. Lyrically the juxtaposition is arresting: A fleeting snapshot of childhood joy collides with an elemental sadness as he reflects on how he was raised — a riptide that still pulls. It’s one of the album’s most powerful themes. 

On the shimmering ‘Falling Apart,’ Caleb pulls focus on harrowing memories — “I’ve got a story you would like / It’s one where I’m forced to sleep outside / It was pretty cold I was twelve years old.” More than ever the art serves as an expression, an explanation, but also a means of understanding. “It’s me trying to pick apart the little threads — that was beautiful, but that was really fucked up,” he explains. “I suppose I’m trying to balance it all and reconcile the till of childhood.”

Those themes are present on ‘I Can’t Afford to Lose You,’ with its raw, impassioned chorus and echoed on the heartbreaking standout ‘How to Kill Houseplants,’ whose lineage traces back to the power-pop balladry of 80s Aussie bands Icehouse and INXS. Curbing the reflexive impulses to pull away, can be tough, yet he never shies away from confronting his own foibles and fuck-ups. “I feel awful and I want to save this thing and I don't know how to do it,” he admits, adding wryly of the houseplant-relationship metaphor, “I should know how to do this by now, but I don't: I've killed 35 creeping ivies.”

Elsewhere, piano ballad ‘ILY the Most’ is destined for arenas twinkling with lighters held high, and the breezy ‘Estimated Delivery’ tells the tale of yearning and long distance love, accompanied by Ashton’s waterfall guitar lines. The beat, meanwhile, started off as a sample which the band recreated with three drum machines. “There's these robot arms that have a little trigger that pops out of a ball that you control with MIDI on either side of a hi-hat which is playing perfect sixteenths” explains Caleb. “And then Kieran’s there manually choking and releasing the hat to give it this human imperfection, but it's perfectly in time. It sounds like a sampled breakbeat, but we built it brick-by-brick.”

With its skippy drums and arpeggiated synths, the sprightly album opener ‘Through My Teeth’ belies the time Caleb experienced when cutting ties with the strictures of the church, heading to college at 18, and getting “unruly and blackout”. Ironically it was in the church environment where he learned to play guitar, but music outside of worship was verboten, and for a period he left that dream behind — instead partying to excess to outrun his demons and flunking his engineering course, while his relationships buckled. This was followed by a breakdown and several subsequent years spent dealing with the fallout. Not a savior, perhaps, but Spacey Jane certainly became his purpose and his solace. 

“I personally credit the band, but particularly Ashton and Kieran, because Peppa joined later, for showing extreme grace and love and forgiving me over and over again,” he explains. Together the band share an unbreakable bond that makes Spacey Jane tick: Peppa with her fizzing energy and dreamy harmonies stands as a balancing, steadying force; Kieran, the band’s rhythmic core and co-manager, patient, protective, savvy; and Ashton, a high-kicking, louchely exuberant stage presence whose sharp technical chops never hamper his unconventional approach to songwriting. 

As a phrase, “if that makes sense,” is often used as a query without a question mark, a request for reassurance that can inadvertently signal a lack of confidence in what's being expressed. And yet, Spacey Jane have never sounded bigger, brighter, or more self-assured. This comes not through swaggering bombast, but rather in the way they’ve embraced pop hooks, and the way life’s clamor of contradictions and nuances — the love, the heartbreak, the frustration, the disappointment, and the lacerating self-doubt — are tackled with a clear-eyed directness and empathy too. And it hits. Because we’re all trying to figure shit out and become the people we want to be. 

“In one sense the art is just something I want to do, and in another sense, it's the whole backbone of this amazing life,” explains Caleb. “It’s a complicated thing to figure out, but I’m so grateful for everything that went into making this record, and what it made us. For me at least, this process broke me down — it was like stepping off the cliff and not knowing if you're going to be caught, but it also made me way more sure of who I am and the kind of artist I want to be. I love this project and I want to play it for people, and I love my bandmates and this thing we've built together. We stepped off the cliff everyday and loved it, and we have never been happier with our work than we are now. So it is with great uncertainty and immense pride that we deliver this album.”