Emerging out of Melbourne’s deeply interconnected underground in the early 2000s, Eddy Current Suppression Ring – composed of Brendan Suppression, Mikey Young, Danny Current and Brad Barry – never moved like a band chasing permanence, legacy, or even momentum. Their records felt instinctive, immediate and built around a community, rather than strategic. However, whilst never seeking traditional industry inclusion or careerism, the group became one of the most influential Australian guitar bands of their generation and cohort. Their 2008 self-titled record and the monumental Primary Colours, which won the Australian Music Prize in 2010, continue to cast a long shadow over contemporary Australian underground music and are on frequent rotation for those who have good taste and are good fun.
Now, after 15 years away from releasing new material, the band have returned with a new record, In Light of Recent Events, not to monopolise on an anniversary comeback tour but to continue seeing each other and friends and doing what they love. We had the pleasure of speaking with guitarist and producer, Mikey Young, ahead of their run of live dates including appearances at Vivid Sydney and upcoming headline shows across Australia.
Always creating, Young has spent the years since Eddy Current’s hiatus becoming one of the most respected figures in Australian independent music, both through bands including Total Control and The Green Child, and through his mastering and production work with countless underground artists. His fingerprints are all over the sound of modern Australian punk and post-punk, even if he’d likely recoil at the suggestion. From the outside, Eddy Current’s return appears monumental: a beloved band re-emerging after a decade and a half. Internally, however, Young insists it never entirely disappeared. “From an outsider’s perspective it seems like 15 years, and it is 15 years, but to us, we’ve been jamming pretty solidly for the last few years, and we all still hang out. It just took a long while to leak it out into the outside world.”
“None of us feel sick of playing those songs. I still feel really grateful that people give a shit about something we did 15 or 20 years ago.”
The band approached their re-emergence cautiously, beginning with what Young refers to as “baby steps”: a handful of intimate Melbourne performances before committing to larger shows. There was genuine anxiety attached to the return. Eddy Current had exited at a creative peak, and with that comes the looming fear of tarnishing something cherished. “The fear for us was, ‘Oh shit, we’re going to come back 15 years later and ruin any legacy we have by being bad,’” Young laughs. “But it was really comforting to see that it just felt kind of the same.” Evidently the band’s chemistry and genuine like for one another remains intact. Eddy Current did not collapse spectacularly; life simply intervened. People had children, bought houses and started businesses. Time moved forward. “There was no band turmoil,” Young says. “None of us feel sick of playing those songs. I still feel really grateful that people give a shit about something we did 15 or 20 years ago.”
What has changed most dramatically in those intervening years is the landscape surrounding guitar music itself. The Australian underground that birthed Eddy Current once revolved around independent radio stations, small venues, record stores and tightly woven local scenes. Today, music discovery exists inside algorithmic abundance. Everything is available at once, but community itself can feel harder to locate. Young remains hesitant to romanticise the past, though he acknowledges how formative Melbourne’s infrastructure was to the band’s existence. Working at Corduroy Records in the late 1990s became an accidental education in DIY culture. “Everyone worked at a record label, everyone had at least one band, everyone kind of just did things themselves,” he recalls. “Seeing that community there was basically the start of everything for me.” He also speaks reverently about community radio institutions like Triple R and PBS FM, describing them less as promotional platforms than connective tissue. “If everything just existed in a streaming world, maybe it wouldn’t feel like a community,” he says. “Those stations provide a home and a context.”
Despite Young’s instinctive resistance to discussing “legacy”, it is impossible to ignore the way younger audiences continue to discover Eddy Current’s catalogue. At recent shows, alongside peacetime devotees, there are new generations encountering these songs in a live setting for the first time. Young himself seems genuinely baffled and moved by this. “There are older people who grew up with us now,” he says, “but there are also heaps of young kids, which is pretty heartwarming to see.”
Part of Eddy Current’s enduring appeal may lie precisely in their resistance to polish. The band’s recordings have always felt gloriously imperfect – documents of people playing together in real time rather than constructions assembled endlessly inside a computer. That philosophy continues throughout In Light of Recent Events, an album largely built from live takes recorded in Young’s own workspace. “I just leave eight mics hanging up,” he explains. “If we make a good song and do a good take, I put a dot next to it on the whiteboard and that’s the album recording.” Avoiding overdubs, Brendan Suppression sings live alongside the band, reacting instinctively to the room around him. Young insists this is not an ideological stance so much as necessity. “What makes this band special is capturing the energy of people playing together,” he says. “Brendan can’t overdub sing. He actually can’t. What makes him Brendan is reacting to what we’re doing in real time.”
In an era increasingly dominated by hyper-edited perfection, there is something almost radical and rebellious about Eddy Current’s refusal to sterilise themselves. Young describes the recordings as full of bleed and imperfections, yet those flaws are precisely what make the music feel alive and definitively theirs. “The sonic trade-off is worth it,” he says. “The energy and performance are better.”
“What makes this band special is capturing the energy of people playing together.”
That instinctive approach extends beyond recording and into the very structure of the band itself. Eddy Current do not reunite to nostalgically perform old records in sequence or cash in on anniversary culture. Young recoils slightly at the idea. “I don’t want to come back and do, like, ‘here’s our second album in its entirety,’” he says. “It would only feel satisfying if new songs were being made.” The existence of In Light of Recent Events therefore feels essential to the band begging to play live again. Young admits that when the band originally paused, he had exhausted the possibilities of their tightly wound sonic palette. Other projects, particularly the more expansive sonic textures of Total Control, offered room to stretch outward creatively. Returning now, however, those limitations themselves feel newly inspiring. “Having a break from this sound means I’m now looking forward to the limitations of it again,” he says.
There is also a socially practical element to Eddy Current’s return. “When we stopped playing, there’d be stretches where I didn’t see Brendan for six months,” he says. “You mean to catch up, but you don’t.” Eventually, what was meant to be dinner simply became a jam session instead. Then another. Soon every Wednesday was blocked out permanently in the calendar. “The good thing about being in a band is you’re guaranteed to see these people every week,” he says.
The upcoming live run, including appearances at Vivid and headline shows at venues including Sydney’s Factory Theatre, seems to have reaffirmed this. Young still sounds mildly astonished discussing the speed at which tickets disappeared. “We’re kind of starting to realise people still care,” he says.
Young, predictably, still struggles with self-doubt around the process. Despite being one of Australia’s most in-demand mastering engineers, he admits he endlessly tweaks records searching for certainty that never arrives. “The things I end up liking the most are always the things I did quickly,” he says. “Every record, right before it comes out, I hit this intense trough of self-doubt.” Perhaps that tension, between instinct and uncertainty or looseness and precision, is exactly what gives Eddy Current their enduring power.
As our conversation wraps, Young remains characteristically humble about the future. There is no grand five-year plan, no carefully articulated second act – just rehearsals, friendships, upcoming shows and a new record that arrived because eventually there were enough dots on a whiteboard to make one.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring will play a free show as part of Vivid Sydney on 12 June. Event details are available on the Vivid Sydney website.
