The Apartments‘ magnificent album ‘In And Out Of The Light’ was one of the brief rays of light of the grim 2020 – one of my favourite albums of that year. With one of Brisbane’s greatest singer/songwriters, Peter Milton Walsh (briefly an early Go-Between), The Apartments are possibly one of the most underrated bands coming out of Australia, leaving an indelible impression on indie music in the southern hemisphere and beyond.
It is welcome news then that the band has just announced the release of a new album ‘That’s What The Music is For’ on October 17th via Riley Records/MGM and in Europe, UK and USA by Talitres To set the scene, the glorious single ‘A Handful of Tomorrow’ has just been unveiled and it is business as usual: a delicate, dreamy reverie carried on gently sparkling guitars and piano with haunting horns. Milton Walsh’s vocals are achingly beautiful – almost cracked with emotion, deep and sonorous.
The lyrics are reflective and poignant:
Still don’t know who runs the game
I loved you while the music played
I loved you through the Autumn days
I loved you while the music played
The beauty too, of what remains
I’ll hold onto…with all that’s gone away
Please is there something I could borrow?
I’ll have a handful of tomorrow
The accompanying video, beautifully directed, shot and edited by Nick Langley, conveys the sense of reflection – black and white scenes of Milton Walsh performing in the dappled sunshine against an urban backdrop, imbued with light and dark contrasts, contemplative and statuesque:
What a glorious return.
The Apartments will be touring Australia later this year followed by France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal from March 2026.
| ⭐Australian live show dates⭐ |
| Sydney 17 October – Low 302 – Tickets |
| Brisbane 25 October – Junk Bar – Tickets |
| Melbourne 15 November – George Lane – Tickets |
Milton Walsh provides a fascinating, detailed and beautiful insight into the development of the album:
I’m superstitious. I like to start writing for a new album once the last one’s out and moving around the world, all the time wondering if a song will ever turn up again. After touring Europe with In and Out of the Light, I began writing what evolved into That’s What the Music is For.
Out of this kaleidoscope of images and lines in which the boundaries of the present and the past were blurred, the songs began to appear.
Casino Life came first. I write to find out what I’m thinking and my songs know more than I do. Sometimes it takes me a while to work out what they’re telling me. My mind began to fill with people from the past and they would come back, just like happiness does, at unexpected moments. I would see them in the fallen leaves. Why, when walking by the river, did I once again hear “They were my Venice years”? Playing cards at night, how was it that I remembered someone saying, “it’s a casino life…”? As the songs began to accumulate, they carried me in a certain direction.
I wanted to write, in part, about people who’ve mattered to me. Some were still around, some were not. Songs are cinema by other means. They can summon up worlds that are lost to us, amplify the colours of the vanished years. Scenes, lives, conversations. Scraps of memory, faces and voices from out of the past. People whose names no one says anymore. I have a mind that inclines steeply towards hopelessness so I’ve always been drawn to people who are the opposite. I looked for the sun in others, with a different kind of energy, who were full of light and hope. The ones who think – if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
I understood the gift I’d been given as people like this had moved in and out of my life. I wanted to honour and celebrate them, while there was still time. Sometimes, to let them do in song what they could not do in life – to live. I knew what the world had missed out on. What I missed out on. Whether three or twenty three, as they move through the smoke of memory, they will remain who they were – at that age, in that time and place. Ghosts in the evening of my mind. Sometimes I wanted to call up a world that had disappeared, bring back the years that had these people in them and then I understood: that’s what the music is for.
You can pre-order the album here and through the link below:
