Although remembered as the howling guitarist behind Melbourne punk group NOUGHTS, Tom Brierly’s musical output hardly starts and ends there. After leaving Melbourne in 2019 and returning to his home base in London, Brierly has kept busy in a number of London-based punk groups, charming audiences with snarky guitar work and enigmatic performing. Continuing his reinvention, Todd Briefly is our latest introduction to Tom’s work - a project that compounds his influences at home and abroad into succinct nuggets of manic pop and angular post-punk. Released on the UK’s official first day of Spring, Demos is our first taste of Brierly’s sardonic pallet, amalgamating the best of Tom’s weirdo songwriting prowess across the tapes six unique tracks.

Merging abrasive punk with casio-lined pop grooves, Demos mirrors a state of hostility - each song darkly humorous, relatable and brashly optimistic, Brierly’s personality unites the skewed and unpredictable left-turns throughout the tape. On track ‘Houseproud’, this playful hostility shines through stilted rhythms and Brierly’s spirited lyricism, touting lines at the “conseravative-brexit-voting-home-owning-masses-of-middle-england” while keeping his tongue firmly in cheek. With the same wit, ‘Now All My Friends Play Fender Jaguars’ tackles flavour-of-the-month trends, with Tom entailing how quickly things can adapt and change through a discerning observation on guitar preference. Although unabashedly entitled Demos, Todd Briefly is a project that feels as instantaneous as it is refined, riding the line between humble and polished to make for an equally endearing listen.

We had Tom talk us through each of the tracks on Demos below.

Hiding In The Spectrum

The concept of this song was based on a conversation I had with a dear friend on one classically English rainy summer evening. He told me that a family member had once said that he should stop “Hiding in the Spectrum” and that he was a coward. I thought the story was so beautiful and painful in equal measures and it felt like the perfect culmination for a separate personal narrative I was working on at the time, one that explored the everyday battles of modern life, and that in spite of these battles, I really don’t want to end up like another dead young musician. I feel like the refrain of “Don’t go believing any words that I said, because you know I’m about as fickle as it gets” is basically a disclaimer for the rest of the record. Take everything that follows with a fistful of salt.

The Extensive Waterways of the United Kingdom

I was listening to a lot of Neil Young at the time and the main guitar part here was me trying to play something a little more melodic. I’ve had people compliment/criticise my guitar playing on previous projects and I’ve often been described as ‘atonal’. I really hope these critics hear this song and all of its two chord glory. Lyrically if follows on with similar themes to the opener but leaving the bleak existentialism and focusing more on restlessness and a whimsical desire to travel, a dreamer coming to terms with the fact that their plans rarely get actualised. The setting is a romanticised version of my friend’s boat that’s moored on the banks of the Thames but it soon slips off into a story of rekindled love and dreams of eloping to this semi-fictional place that’s extremely vivid in my mind.

Now All My Friends Play Fender Jaguars

Now this song is an observation of how cities change and how much you notice these changes after being away, documented through the changing guitar trends. When I left London in 2016, the city felt like a really different place, still in the thralls of a fuzzed out East London garage punk scene. As the music scene got a little softer and relocated to the south east of the city, the song addresses the fear that people and art can become irrelevant and left behind. For the record I actually love Fender Jaguars.

Houseproud

Ah, the song with the chorus! I tend to avoid traditional choruses in my song writing, mainly because I’m not good enough to make them not sound shit. But I think this one came out alright. Lyrically, it’s a very childish song, pointing the finger wildly, without any real wit or intelligence, at the conseravative-brexit-voting-home-owning-masses-of-middle-england. I actually had a long outro written in a ‘White Light/White Heat’ style but I stupidly didn’t make the track long enough so when I came to do vocals it didn’t fit. I’d always thought I’d record these songs properly and make a real album so I just assumed I’d add that section then.

Googling My Symptoms

I think this song is pretty self explanatory and something that almost everyone can relate to. I had a lot of fun with the words on this one and I think rhyming “malaria” with “scarier” is probably one of my finest lyrical moments. As with all the songs on this record, everything was recorded in one take, but they’re some real noticeable mistakes on this one that really contribute to a pretty dark and dissonant sound. I don’t think I intended for the song to end up quite so unsettling but I think that when combined with the pretty ridiculous lyrical content, it works quite well.

Hard Rubbish

So this is a love song about Melbourne, a city that I no longer live in and that I miss very much. I wrote it last summer when I was having a pretty rough time when it felt like everyone had social plans apart from me and I got a little consumed by some good old fashioned teenage loneliness. Probably the best time to write a sappy indie song.