Melbourne’s Billy Peril have been quietly building one of the more compelling debut album rollouts of the year, and ‘Tornado’, the third single lifted from that forthcoming record on Cheersquad Records & Tapes, might be the best evidence yet of why. We are honoured to premiere it here today.
The first two singles set the terms nicely. ‘The Whitest Bread’ arrived lean and skeletal, an art-pop miniature with a kind of gentle euphoria running under its surface. ‘My Kind Of Madness’ went the other way — homespun, hooky, the sort of song that could pass for a misplaced Go-Betweens or Bats B-side, all warm indie-rock familiarity. ‘Tornado’ takes a third path again, and by the band’s own account it’s one close to their heart: Will Dyer has called it one of his favourites from the album, and it’s easy to hear why.
There’s a restlessness to the arrangement — bass and guitar chasing each other in close formation, never quite settling, the whole thing carried along on a current of jittery, jangling momentum. It sounds like it’s in a hurry to get somewhere, even if it’s not entirely sure where, a circular hypnotic riff and an almost rockabilly reverb-soaked vocal with chaotic backing vocals.
That unease turns out to be the point. Dyer, by his own telling, wrote ‘Tornado’ at the intersection of two things happening at once, in the same place:
How many of life’s biggest events happen around hospitals? This song carries two of them at once: day one of a new but still-unknown love, and a colossal loss that changes lives forever, mostly for the worse.
The memory he traces it back to is precise, almost cinematic in its detail:
I hear the clang of her folding bike from five floors down as she bundles it into the lift and the mechanism starts to whir. Here she is. Standing outside in the fresh air for a reprieve from the misery of palliative care. The gum tree above drips as a bout of rain passes. Flame to grey.
It’s a lot to carry inside three minutes of jangle-pop, and part of what makes ‘Tornado’ land is that it doesn’t try to resolve the contradiction — the love and the loss just sit there together, unreconciled, which is presumably how it felt at the time.
Billy Peril operate as two bands wearing one name, and it’s worth understanding both halves to get a sense of where a song like this sits. The version that plays live is a guitar trio — occasionally expanding to four — built around Dyer, Steve Harris (Saint Jude) and drummer Drew Schapper (Signal Chain, Pretty City). The story goes that Dyer and Harris hashed out the idea for the band on a long drive, with Comet Gain, The Go-Betweens and Yo La Tengo doing the talking through the car speakers. What started as a short recording stint with producer Brooke Penrose turned into something much longer, and the results land somewhere in that well-worn but still fertile strain of Australian indie — melodic without being precious, a little melancholy, occasionally punchy — and translate on stage into something closer to scrappy, unfussy pub rock than any kind of revivalist exercise.
The other half of the project is stranger and quieter: a bedroom electronic outlet that started when Dyer picked up a drum machine and commandeered Harris’s old bass. Penrose’s fingerprints are on this side of things too, but the results head in the opposite direction — hazier, more lo-fi, built for headphones rather than a stage.
‘Tornado’ belongs to the rock and roll side of that split, but it carries some of the intimacy of the other. The tension in the playing does a lot of the emotional work here, and once you know what’s underneath it, that tension makes a lot more sense.
‘Tornado’ is out tomorrow via Cheersquad Records & Tapes, on Bandcamp, streaming services, and AMRAP.
