Melbourne outfit Great Outdoors has made a significant transformation in just a few short months. What began as a solo project of Totally Mild guitarist Zachary Schneider developed late last year into a three-piece band when Schneider connected with Dylan Young and Max Sheldrake-Falovic, two musicians that would soon become a part of the Great Outdoors family.
That encounter, coupled with a shared frustration of the laboured and often tedious process of making albums, led to Great Outdoors writing and recording forthcoming record Fake News in just three short months, with the band today premiering the album’s first cut ‘Part Ways’.
“When I wrote this song I’d been playing louder music with other people,” Schneider tells Music Feeds. “I’d been touring with Free Time who were a really loud live band. After Dion went back to New York and Free Time had stopped playing, I still wanted a loud, no-frills type band. This was the first song I wrote for it. I gave it to Dylan and Max and I had my band.
“I knew when they made their parts up on the spot that I could write a whole record really fast. The song is about realising you’re being used by someone you like.” While ‘Part Ways’ is an honest and scathing statement on the fickleness of hook up culture, Schneider says the rest of the album, Fake News, deals much less with “interpersonal issues” and instead takes on the nature of Australian politics.
“Nobody cares about our politics on a global scale,” explains Schneider. “If it was an American record, it would have different connotations. The Australian left is different to the American left.”
Fake News is set to be released on June 30th.
