An unrelenting force in the Melbourne music scene, The Stained Daisies have spent the better part of the last decade churning out blitz after blitz of their idiosyncratic brand of bluesy garage-rock. Not ones to abide by any genre expectations, their last release was their Jazz Club EP, which saw the quartet bouncing between clever indie-rock, charged psychedelia and anything (and everything) in between. It’s only been about six months since then and they’re back at it again with a new twist, in the form of the fiery ‘Individuality (Is Fine As Long As We Do It Together)’.

While their presser tells us this track marks the group’s “first foray into poetic punk”, what’s immediately striking is how instantaneous The Stained Daisies sound here. After opening with a razor-sharp guitar intro, the track bursts into a searing groove as the band’s dynamic group vocals take the wheel, refusing to beat around the bush as they launch into a frenzied investigation into identity politics. While the band’s usual antics are definitely in play, this track somehow feels all the more theatrical while simultaneously getting straight to the point; fortunately, there’s still time in this three minute burner to squeeze in plenty of absurdist hooks and a couple of frantic guitar solos.

Speaking about the track, bassist and vocalist Jack Davison shares “'Individuality (Is Fine As Long As We Do It Together)' aims to make people realise that at a base level, we're all just kooky little individuals trying to figure out this big bad world." Leaving us hungry to dig a little deeper, we got in touch with the band to delve into some of the key influences behind the new single.


Dr Sure's Unusual Practice

One of our good mates, Dougal Shaw, and his band Dr Sure's Unusual Practice, were certainly an inspiration for me on this one. Both the punky driven instrumentation approach and also the lyrical content, as Dr Sure's mostly writes politically driven tunes. Whilst 'Individuality (Is Fine As Long As We Do It Together)' isn't specifically about Australian politics or one specific political issue, the broader vibe of the song is about the seriousness of the divisive state of the world, so yeah, without waffling on too much, getting my political thinking cap on can be attributed to Dougesy.


Kanye West - 'Ye vs The People'

This Kanye West song, where he essentially has a debate with T.I. about politics and the world following the Trump election was partly an inspiration. I certainly don't agree with all of Kanye's ideas and actions, but one line from this tune jumped out at me as interesting - “All blacks gotta be democrats man, we ain't made it off the plantation”. I think I mainly found it interesting because it touched on the traps of pigeon-holing people based on their group identity. I understand why Kanye gets a lot of attention and hate, but if you wade through all of his bullshit you can find some fairly interesting and thought-provoking social commentary amongst it.


Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

This short story by Vonnegut, I found super interesting. Essentially, in the future, to achieve total physical and mental equality, every single human has government-mandated handicaps. For example - if you are too fast, you have a weight attached to you, if you are too beautiful, you are forced to wear a mask, if you are too curious, you receive an electric shock to your brain so that you forget what you were thinking about. Pretty grim reading but still interesting and it made me think more about how everybody's individual uniqueness is what makes us all interesting.


M*A*SH

Going through high school, I lived with my old man in Grafton. Every evening we would watch a couple of episodes of the 70's dark comedy M*A*S*H. I picked up the line “individuality is fine as long as we do it together” from the show during an interaction between Frank Burns and Hawkeye. I thought it was clever. I remembered it last year, slightly tweaked it and then threw it in with a bunch of other ideas I had.