Good Morning Seven, the new 17 track double LP from Good Morning out now
PRAISE FOR Good Morning
“Good Morning is a band that might have stayed one of Australia’s best-kept secrets – were it not for a series of unexpected co-signs... The album feels like something of a reset after a mammoth few years... where many songs wonder about the future and what it means to live and sustain a creative life. It might be an existential crisis – or it might just be ageing.”
“Liam Parsons and Stefan Blair’s music oozes personality; masters of tone, shepherds of sonics, and wizards of words, the cult two-piece have shown immense character and craft throughout their discography. Never veering from their distinctly DIY approach, they remain authentic and unique, perching at the forefront of global indie, established as one of Australia’s most cherished acts”
“Completely natural and welcoming, satisfying on the ear, warm to the touch and authentic in its presence”
“"Excalibur” is far from freaked-out... a soothing soft-rock composition paired with nearly mumbled vocals from Parsons”
“Lush retro pop balladry... melodious pop-rock, magnificently rendered with a gentle touch”
“Toil and talent”
“Polished and accomplished... they've evolved”
“Reminding us just how proficient they are at arranging”
“One of the country's most beloved acts”
TRACKLIST
1. Arcade
2. Ahhhh (This Isn’t Ideal)
3. Monster Of The Week
4. As The Dogs Were Playing
5. The Worm Turns
6. Dog Years
7. Queen Of Comedy
8. The Lake
9. Diane Said
10. One Night
11. Excalibur
12. Real I’m Told
13. Just In Time
14. Toy
15. Jelly Legs
16. Dogs On The Beach
17. The Fear!
Good Morning Seven LP is out now, buy/stream it here.
Today Good Morning share their seventh album, Good Morning Seven out via Polyvinyl (ROW) and Good Morning Music Company Worldwide (ANZ). Arriving ahead of their just announced RISING Festival appearance at Melbourne Recital Hall on June 6. LISTEN HERE + TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE.
While Good Morning Seven is a testament to the investment (and pay-off) in taking time, narratively the album considers the very real fear of it being wasted against the means we seek to enrich it. Contentment and how it is reached or secured as an achievement, overlaps 17 tracks with Good Morning’s enduring canine talisman – their metaphor for the human condition – alongside their stories on how we impact the hourglass passing. Here digging holes, routine, the dog year formula, even the effect of moonlight symbolise Liam Parsons and Stefan Blair’s own reckoning of self.
Already praised by The Guardian for its “wry, charismatic, self-effacing paeans to the pain and pleasure of existence,” Good Morning’s most sub/consciously honest album yet unravels the behavioural patterns – some unhealthier than others – and flaws against: the sentimentality of romance whether looking to its future or its memory of the past; domesticity side-by-side with the state of their creative careers; the wealth of their accumulated life experiences while also never quite feeling old “enough”; through to their own loyalty and dependency with others canvassed through a myriad of rewarding and unfortunate series of events.
Good Morning Seven is an album of navigating choice, from taking plunges in confrontation (As The Dogs Were Playing) to realising aspirations (One Night) and how our needs and desires change (Ahhhh (This Isn’t Ideal). Knowing when to source self belief (Just In Time), to persist (The Fear!) or to break away from bad habits (Real I’m Told), Liam and Stefan give space to the freedom or guilt felt with every decision. Teaching moments abound from evolving career desires (The Worms Turn, Monster Of The Week); reliance on pride and vices (Dog Years, The Lake), the changing nature of relationships (Arcade) to the simplicity of everyday (Diane Said). Even the moments that make us feel foolish (Dogs On The Beach) or like grown up children (Jelly Legs), to the beauty in coincidence (Toy) and lingering contemplation (Excalibur).
Good Morning consider and celebrate the weird, the insular and the shitty, a stream of lessons learnt no matter how big or small. In Stefan’s words, “nothing’s ever truly ideal, but you gotta appreciate those in between moments when you’re not overwhelmed by it all.” The deeper reward on Good Morning Seven for the duo though, when given the room to quietly freak out and assess the random instances of their lives, gave Liam and Stefan the means to enhance and sharpen their creative toolbox. Emerging with their seventh album as a confident creative partnership, defiantly DIY as ever, though with every deeply considered intention laid out in a rich suite of strings, synths and guitars, narrowing 70 tracks from their songwriting bank into the cohesive 17 track journey that arrives today.
Over the past decade, Good Morning have carved out a peculiar, hard-to-define indie career for themselves, amassing a global cult fanbase and hundreds of millions of streams despite (or perhaps because of) their defiantly DIY approach. The band/duo/recording-thing from Naarm / Melbourne, Australia come together as Stefan Blair (29, brown hair, 6 foot something) plays most of the instruments and sings half the songs. Liam Parsons (30, brown hair, 6 foot on the dot) plays the rest of the instruments and sings the other half of the songs.
The band name is intentionally impossible to Google but hasn’t gotten in the way of them getting shouted out by Tyler, The Creator, sampled by A$AP Rocky, going viral on TikTok (for their 2015 track ‘Warned You’), or touring the globe (including the US, Mexico, China, Japan, Thailand, and beyond). Their 2021 album Barnyard, both thoughtful and catchy, released internationally via Polyvinyl was met with widespread acclaim from Rolling Stone, NME, Stereogum, The Line Of Best Fit, Consequence, Alt Press, Paste, DIY Magazine, Northern Transmissions, KCRW, 6Music and more – setting the scene for their seventh record Good Morning Seven.
A moment in the two piece’s history, Good Morning Seven marks a significant shift for the duo who typically write and record independently from each other, in a matter of days, releasing albums, EPs and double tracks all in a quick sequence of each other. Their most ambitious project to date is made possible thanks to their own decade-long friendship. Liam and Stefan stretched days into longer periods of gestation, steadily developed their own studio spaces with gear accumulated or kindly borrowed, and a string of collaborators invited to contribute for the first time ever.
While it’s written, recorded, engineered, and produced solely by Good Morning, they further expand their world with an integrated community of contributors in mix engineer Tyler Karmen (Noname, DIIV, Devendra Banhart) with parts overdubbed at Stella Mozgawa’s (drummer of Warpaint) Joshua Tree studio, Fred Kevorkian (The White Stripes, Iggy Pop, The National, Willie Nelson) who mastered in Brooklyn, string arrangements by Chloe Sanger, Greer Clemens and Dannika Horvat on harmonies (the only guest vocalists on record to date), and Stefan’s father Glenn Blair even played woodwinds. The double album filled with strings, synths, samples and singing marks their 10th year anniversary of being a band. It’s all downhill from here.
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