Alternative grunge rockers LARSEN have a debut EP, debut album, with a follow-up EP expected out this year. The band just wants to get their music heard with lots more coming soon. The band goes into chatter about nothing but their music!
1. Please tell us about the history of your band and its members.
Larsen began when frontman and rhythm guitarist Liam Christensen approached high school friend and lead guitarist Sam Massacci about forming a grunge band. They found drummer Alex Andrews on the internet through what essentially amounted to a dating service but for finding bandmates, and Sam asked his cousin Steven if he wanted to play bass. The four lads met at a rehearsal space in August 2014, and all four members remain to this day, almost 6 years on from the band's formation. We played our first gig in February 2015, released our first EP later that year, and have been playing gigs and releasing music ever since, evolving the band's sound to a more mature brand of alternative rock, but still with those original grunge and post grunge flavors.
2. What’s the origin of the band’s name?
Larsen is simply the name of the street where Liam, Sam and Alex first played together. Finding a band name is one of the hardest parts of putting an act together, so we settled on something relating to our origin. We later found out that the “Larsen effect” is another term for the feedback one gets when you put a guitar up to an amp, a happy coincidence.
3. Where is the band based out of and what is your music scene like there? Are there any local bands you could recommend?
We are all born and raised in Adelaide, capital city of the state of South Australia. The saying goes that no one is sure whether Adelaide is a big town or a small city, and the music scene tends to reflect that. Ours is a vibrant, diverse scene, with representation from many different genres. Some mates of ours include Agapanther, Paper Sunsets, Down and Out, Copious Dribble, Bitchspawn, Indiago, Lost Woods, Wolf and Chain, Mum’s Favorite, and that’s just a handful of great local bands from the scene.
4. How would you describe your style?
Starting as a pretty straight up and down grunge band, our songwriting sensibilities started to get into a broader sense of alternative rock, taking cues from different genres outside of bands like Nirvana and Violent Soho, and looking at mature sounds of bands like Basement and Balance & Composure. Each member has a fairly different music taste from each other, and little details always end up in the melting pot that becomes a song or EP or album, all tied together as the Larsen sound we’ve cultivated over the years.
5. What have you released so far and what can someone expect from your works?
Our first EP titled Another Realm, Another Day was our first attempt at throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what stuck. Certainly rough around the edges, but you can definitely tell that we are the same band we were back then, just much more refined. We released a full length Album in 2016 titled Weightless Again. 11 tracks long, this was us pushing ourselves to our songwriting capabilities as a band. Plenty of songs on the album are still live staples for us, and the success of those songs have stylistically informed our releases since then. After a handful of singles from 2017 to 2020, we’re now poised to release a new EP later this year. The EP will collect five songs that we as a band unanimously agree is our best work to date. We’re super excited for people to hear it!
6. Do you have any new music in the works?
As mentioned above, we recorded five new tracks in January, one of which is our latest single Eating Me Alive. We plan to release one more single in July, before releasing the full EP later in the year
7. How about playing shows and touring, have anything planned out?
We’re currently in the middle of a tour for Eating Me Alive, with a show in Melbourne this weekend and two shows in Tasmania in June. It’s been very freeing to be back on stage in front of an audience after COVID lockdowns.
8. What plans do you have for the future as a band?
Aside from the release schedule this year, we have plans as a band to just keep producing music we’re proud of, and take steps to get as many people to hear it as possible. We love doing what we do, and we'll keep doing it until we stop loving it.
9. Where can we listen to your band and where can we buy your stuff?
You can find us on Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you listen to music, and you can buy our merch from our BandCamp!
10. What is it you’d like a listener to remember the most when hearing your music for the first time
We'd like people to be reminded of the golden age of 90s Seattle grunge, but not so much that they think we're doing a bad impression of it. We'd like listeners to hear the roots of that grunge, only evolved into something more diverse and mature as a musical experience. And obviously, we'd like listeners to like what they hear.
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