Up And Comers, Liquid Zoo, Chat All Things Music Including Their Newest Single ‘Okay’
{interview by Emily-Layne Kapetanovic}
At only 17, these four Tamworth-based indie rockers are making a name for themselves across the country. After charting on the Triple J Unearthed overall charts they’ve reached the hearts of over 13,000 Spotify listeners plus more across the board. With only three tracks available for streaming at the moment, it gets us excited for what the boys have up their sleeves.
Lets start at the very beginning, how to Liquid Zoo come to be?
The band started around April last year, although we were under a different name (picking a name and sticking to it proved quite a challenge for us). It began in the school holidays when I visited our drummer Oscar’s house who I’d been friends with since primary school, although it was our first time properly catching up in a few years. It turned out he and I had both recently had been showing keen interest in the music scene, he’d played drums for a while now and was producing beats for artists online, and I had just started to learn guitar. His dad had built an old shed studio out the back which hadn’t been used in years, and that say we set to cleaning it out and getting it set up, keen for a jam. A few hours later we got to playing and it was apparent straight away that there was something special there.
We realised we needed a bass player so we recruited Issie, another friend from primary school who we heard could play. Now as a trio band we started to jam, hang out and play at the local jam night at the pub, and we even secured a gig which earned us a grand total of $20 each. We were pretty dodgy to start off with and we discovered after trying for a while that none of us could sing to save our life, so we set out on finding a singer. A couple of months later we had a jam with Vanda (who was also an old friend from school) and he asked us to help play with him for a friends party. We found we got along well and we just kind of stuck together, plus he was a good singer. We kept writing more songs and after about 30 more name changes we somehow stuck with Liquid Zoo.
You guys are quite new on to the scene, what would you like people to know about you who may not have come across your music before?
I think that at the end of the day for us, the music is what comes first. We want our music to make a deep emotional connection with people and really resonate with them.
How does if feel having your new track ‘Okay’ out in the world?
Yeah it feels really great, it’s a song that we’ve had about for a long time which started as a very simple idea which we built upon and slowly added new ideas to.
What inspired the new track?
It’s a pretty funny story actually, it was one of the first songs we wrote and finished the lyrics up in a day and wrote them about Issie’s love life at the time. The main guitar riff and melody was actually made by Oscar who plays drums. He had never picked up a guitar in his life, when all of a sudden he randomly picked it up and started plucking that riff. It started out as a bit of a joke song but we realised it actually had quite a catchy chorus and we worked on it a lot till it was properly ready.
When writing music do you tend to draw from experience or write to create feeling?
A bit of both but mostly we use experience because it’s easier to write and put meaning into for us.
Your debut track ‘Stay With Me’ landed you a spot on the Triple J Unearthed charts, how did that feel?
It feels great that it got the attention it did, we’re pretty proud and also very thankful for all the support we got from people in our home town and listeners across the world.
What are your hopes for Liquid Zoo in the future?
We hope that this epidemic ends soon, it’s a real tragedy for not only people in the music industry but for everyone else in the world. After it’s over we’re looking to record and release more singles and eventually an album. We want to gig as much as possible and get our name out there and and hopefully even play at some festivals.
Keep up to date with all things Liquid Zoo here.