Premiere: Gun Laws confront the compromises of survival on the volatile new single 'Deals! Deals! Deals!'

Naarm/Melbourne post-punk five-piece Gun Laws are back, and Backseat Mafia has the exclusive premiere of their new single “Deals! Deals! Deals!”, out 18 September.

The track is built on the band’s signature restlessness — shifting intensities, four vocalists trading lines, and an energy that never quite settles. It’s a sound that’s grown a long way from where the band’s members started: guitarist Matt and bassist Jake first crossed paths as teenagers in Adelaide, cutting their teeth in punk band Jerks and building a following through makeshift DIY shows before eventually reconvening in Melbourne with drummer Jordie to found Gun Laws in 2019. Two albums followed — their 2020 self-titled debut and 2022’s Merzbau Burning — before the lineup expanded further, with Elisa’s vocals and Waldie’s saxophone becoming full-time fixtures by 2024.

Lyrically, “Deals! Deals! Deals!” digs into difficult territory. Vocalists Jordie and Elisa wrote their verses out of genuinely hard periods — the strain of parenting through a relationship breaking down, and the weight of depression — and the song holds those experiences together as a single portrait of people barely keeping their footing. What emerges isn’t despair so much as defiance: a refusal to give up hope even at the lowest points.

Musically, the track reflects how far the band’s punk and hardcore roots have travelled — post-punk and new wave now sit alongside jazz, soul and more experimental electronic touches, with the interplay between four voices doing a lot of the heavy lifting. It was tracked with producer Rohan Sforcina, with the core takes recorded at Sydney Road Studios in Coburg before vocals and saxophone were finished off at a studio in Mont Albert, and mastered by Adelaide’s Adam Collins.

The unashamedly antipodean-accented vocals are urgent, angry, excoriating over the driving instruments, an angular pop punk blush filled with an euphoric delivery: