Dust Of Us Walk Through Their Debut EP, ‘Never Had The Time’
Sydney duo, Dust Of Us have recently released their super creative debut EP, Never Had The Time. It’s a collection of 6 tracks that bend the rules in terms of creative output genre delivery. We are blessed to have the boys walk us through each track and give us some more depth for the new EP.
Nostalgia – We wrote and recorded 80% of this track back in 2009. Not 2019. 2009! Many years before Dust of Us existed. When it came time to assemble this EP, we didn’t feel like we had the right opening track – until we remembered this song was sitting on a hard drive somewhere. We found it, wrote a few new parts and finished it off. The lyrics are about someone close to me who was suffering really badly. It’s about wanting to alleviate their pain and not knowing how to.
The song features some guitar from our friend Nick and angelic backing vocals from our friend Mish. And yep, their parts were tracked back in 2009 too.
Surrender – This song is a bit of an outlier on the EP cos it’s more upbeat than all the other tracks. The instrumental reminds me of a cross between Pulp and LCD Soundsystem. To me, it’s about sliding doors moments in your life and wondering whether you took the right path with key big decisions. I actually originally wrote this whole song on acoustic guitar and then we moved it across to synths, programmed drums etc. Proud of how it turned out.
7 Years – Memory, regret and the passing of time are recurring themes on the EP, which is one of the reasons why it’s called ‘Never Had the Time’. I interpret the lyrics on this song a few different ways, but one interpretation is that it’s about a relationship that has crumbled so slowly that neither party realised until it was too late. Like the frog in boiling water idea (although that’s apparently a myth). We chose to make it a duet to show both perspectives.
Punching Bag – The instrumental for this song came together really quickly and was mostly the work of my brother. I originally wrote the lyrics about someone I was really angry with, but then I realised there were other undertones in there that were even more sinister. I’d been reading Jess Hill’s brilliant book about domestic violence ‘See What You Made Me Do’ and I think some of that seeped into the song. The whole thing was getting way too dark and depressing with my baritone voice, plus I thought the song would be stronger if sung by a woman, so we asked our friend Jess Chalker to do it. She brought power and a lighter energy to the song that my original vocal didn’t have.
The Swans – This was the first song we ever finished for Dust of Us and I still really like it. The music takes some surprising twists and I love the way it explodes at the end. The lyrics are semi stream of consciousness, but it’s loosely about friendship.
Hunt In Packs – This is a song about childhood and wanting to hold onto that feeling of being young and carefree. It took me forever to nail the vocal take cos it’s a lot higher than I like to sing; but I’m glad I pushed for it, because the higher range gives the melody a nice innocence which suits the song. A lot of the EP is quite cold sounding – this is easily the warmest sounding song – so it’s a nice note for it to end on I think.
Never Had The Time is available now, everywhere.
