WRITTEN BY EITAN OHANA
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Radio Free Alice’s debut album is a plea to introspection, to dissecting the different pieces of the meal we call life
On their debut album, What’s In Between, Radio Free Alice reckons with a state of liminality, feelings of regret, and the ambition of youth. It’s the moment that this band gets to bid adieu to an era of head down hard work and welcome the fruits of a fully fleshed out project, exciting, eclectic, and inspired.
“Everything up until and including this album has represented who we are in the stages of our career,” guitarist Jules Paradiso says. “I’d like to think this is a nice bowtie on that.”
It’s a funny thing, as a consumer, to think of an album as a bowtie. For us, who aren’t part of the process until the results are in, the record is the entire outfit. It’s a black tie party, the appointment listening that’s become as eventized as it is authentic. But for the artist, it makes all the sense in the world.
Paradiso, along with band members Noah Learmonth (vocals/guitar), Michael Phillips (bass), and Lochie Dowd (drums), reached into their back catalogue and pulled out songs and snippets they’d been sitting on for a while, and put on their welding caps to bring it all together, making this record a culmination of much of their early music-making lives.
“It’s a mixture of pressure and excitement and relief … it feels nice to be able to move on and tour and write again,” he says.
Conceptually, there’s the bowtie. So, then, what is the album itself? Not the outer packaging, the resemblance from a distance, but the details, the fabric it’s made of? This album is a graduation. It’s stepping onto the stage, being handed your diploma, saying goodbye to your past and hello to your future all in the same pounding heartbeat. It’s being relieved that you did it, but scared that you might not know what’s next, and all the same excited at the uncertainty.
In our discussion, I shared a personal story with Paradiso of when I was experiencing all those emotions. It was the week of my college graduation, and after a long (fun) Saturday of gradbashing, my friend and I welcomed the sunset with “Look What You’ve Done,” off the band’s debut self-titled EP. The song will forever serve as melodic nostalgia for me, remnants of a time when I felt all that conflict.
Though the songs on What’s In Between don’t sound like “Look What You’ve Done” and earlier projects, the thematic core is a guiding light that holds your hand and reminds you who it is you’re listening to.
“We have a tendency to write happy-sad, nostalgic, coming-of-age-esque stuff,” Paradiso states in confirmation of those feelings.
“I’d rather be stuck in hell than stuck in Melbourne with reports to sell,” Learmonth sings on “Big Ideas,” one of the album's singles, which features Rachel Brown from the band Water from Your Eyes.
Radio Free Alice is an Australian band through and through. It’s in their voice, their lyrics, the music they recommend. Which makes a lyric like that all the more resonant, representative of the atmosphere they’re trying to create. It channels the push and pull that people experience with their homes, the inexorable love akin to the one you feel for family, nestled in between the desire to get out, to see something new, different.
They imbue that idea all throughout the album; it’s dressed up with the magic of deep affection.
“Romance is the only thing you’ve got when you’re in suburban bottleshops,” Learmonth chants with a staccato cadence on “Bottleshops.”
As an unknowing American, did I have to look up what a bottleshop is? I did (though I already had it figured with context clues). Does it matter what a bottleshop is? Not really.
“The place itself is arbitrary because it’s just our home,” Paradiso claims. “It’s feeling like you’re not doing what you want to do, like you’re kind of stagnant.”
Fortunately for them, if conjecture has some place here, that feeling will feel distant soon. This album, around its spirit of hearth, is fun to listen to. It’s beautifully instrumented, lyrically alluring, and an overall good time, certain to check off Paradiso’s biggest hope for it.
“If you listen to it once, and you want to listen to it another time, that’s a win.”
Easier said than done, of course, but the music is so rich with variety that the audience is always engaged. The band’s been unafraid to share their ambition and, in turn, the ambitions of the album, which materializes in the different sounds that exist in the songs. While “Big Ideas” might be softer, more subdued, “Rule 31” is frenetic and makes you want to move around. The trick of songwriting is that it doesn’t have to be done in a single session, and these songs weren’t.
“No one part of the song is any less exciting than the other. If you write a song on the spot you might settle for the sake of completion, but when you’re stitching ideas together you have a bunch of great pieces,” Paradiso remarked. “We’ve got this little Frankenstein right here, and it feels nice because you don’t have to compromise as much.”
Perhaps its greatest superpower is that What’s In Between can be whatever you need it to be, whenever you need it to be that. It can be nostalgic, it can be fun, it can represent ambition, it can represent change. At the end of our talk, I asked Paradiso what the last great piece of art he consumed was. His answer was the chicken schnitzel sandwich he’d had for breakfast. This album can be a chicken schnitzel sandwich. And if the past is any indicator for the future, Radio Free Alice will be cooking many more meals for all to enjoy.
