Artist Profile

The Drones

Touring on the back of their fourth album, Havilah, an album of contradictions; where bombast meets beauty; melancholy wrestles with violent guitars and singer Liddiard's incendiary voice lights up his angular poetry.
It's an album that's brimful of the innovation and artistic integrity that has made The Drones one of Australian rock's most critically acclaimed acts here and overseas during the past four years.
It was that spark of originality and blunt-edged chaos that won the Melbourne band the inaugural Australian Music Prize in 2006 for their breakthrough album Wait Long By The River and the Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By.
That same need to push boundaries took them to an old mill in Tasmania to record the follow-up album, 2006's award-winning Gala Mill, and in 2008 their invention, innovation and isolation have combined to produce the fireworks of their most accomplished work to date, Havilah (the name, in case you didn’t know, refers to a biblical land near the Garden of Eden and the valley in which the album was recorded).
There are vaguely familiar nods to Neil Young's paint-stripping guitar spasms on Supercargo and Oh My, while the deliciously meandering pop dirges of Suicide and the Velvet Underground echo in Careful As You Go and Luck in Odd Numbers.