The Goon Sax release new album Mirror II today on Matador

The Goon Sax release their new album Mirror II today on Matador. The band’s third album and first for Matador, Mirror lI is a new beginning: a multi-dimensional eclectic journey of musical craftsmanship that moves from disco to folk to no wave skronk with staggering cohesion. The first-person narratives of their school days have graduated into an immersive and fluid world, one where “the narrator changes, the view-point isn’t definitive”. Songs have been made expansive, more universal, more weird.

Since forming in high school, Brisbane band The Goon Sax—the trio of Riley Jones, Louis Forster, and James Harrison, best friends who take turns writing, singing, and playing each instrument—have been celebrated for their kinetic homemade pop.

On their debut album, 2016’s Up to Anything, it was their candid affection and scrappy instrumentation that drew praise; 2018’s We’re Not Talking was exalted for the same—their massive choruses, a sharpening of their craft, then with an addition of horns, strings, piano, and castanets to their guitar/bass/drums.

Mirror ll, recorded in Bristol at Invada Studios, owned by Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Beak, with producer John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey), is the result of three years of writing, and some considerable time spent apart: Louis relocated to Berlin and worked at a cinema (he sings in German on the track ‘Bathwater’), Riley and James formed an angular post-punk band called Soot. All three experimented with abstract, atonal sounds before recapturing the essence of The Goon Sax: “pop melody,”

Mirror II is intense, the sum of everything that has always made The Goon Sax great: robust sprechgesang, raw lyrical candor, ascending guitar pop structures that would make the most storied jangle bands blush, elevated into their newfound narrative verisimilitude and expanded sonic experimentations.

Stream/download HERE