It’s an unseasonably chilly Thursday evening in mid-January, and the corner of Broadway and Victoria Road in Sydney’s Chippendale is buzzing. Patrons were gathering outside The Lansdowne Hotel armed with digital tickets they’d purchased mere hours before. Above them, a sign reads “Spacey Jane – Sold Out”.
The Fremantle-born four-piece band Spacey Jane (which is comprised of lead vocalist and guitarist Caleb Harper, lead guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu, drummer Kieran Lama, and bassist and backing vocalist Peppa Lane) had announced the concert just one day prior, setting tickets live at 10am on show day. The sale coincided with the announcement that their third studio album, “If That Makes Sense”, would be released on May 9. Of Spacey Jane’s 1.7 million monthly Spotify listeners, it’s hard to tell how many, exactly, are Australian, but given the venue’s compact capacity (300 maximum), it’s safe to say a good portion of fans missed out on the show. Not to worry, though — the band announced an album tour two months later and sold more than 45,000 tickets on the week of sale alone (they’ve since added more dates).
The Lansdowne has a reputation for being an incubator of talent; a place to catch up-and-comers for cheap (sometimes even free) before they either make it big or disappear. The opportunity to see one of this generation’s most popular Australian bands at such a small-but-significant venue is one that doesn’t come around often.
“It was a disaster,” recalls Harper. “Both my pedal boards broke and I didn’t have any click track or backing track for most of the start of the set, which is just like… it’s never happened before.”
Caleb Harper. Photograph by Cole Barash.
Peppa Lane. Photograph by Cole Barash.
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The crowd, by all accounts, was none the wiser. Fans of varying ages packed together in the venue’s poky second-floor room to sing along to Spacey Jane’s hits “Lots of Nothing,” “Feeding the Family” and “Booster Seat”, which landed in the number two spot of Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2020, as well as “All the Noise” – the lead single from their then-forthcoming album. At one point Lane jumped into the crowd to play alongside fans.
The mishaps forced the bandmates to revisit their earlier iterations – an emergent outfit for whom smaller venues were big opportunities. “We didn’t have a backing track, we didn’t have any click or anything like that back then, so it was cool to switch back into that mode,” says Hardman-Le Cornu. “It’s kind of thrilling, when stuff goes wrong.”
When Harper and Hardman-Le Cornu speak with T Australia over Zoom almost two months after the show — the former dialling in from Los Angeles, the latter from Perth — the album’s sophomore single “How to Kill Houseplants” had just been released.
A portrait of a wilting relationship, the track feels unguarded – like the rest of the album. Harper says he mined his own experience for this record’s material, transforming deeply personal events and emotions into tracks that, prior to the album’s release, were already beginning to resonate with the masses. In that sense, “If That Makes Sense” functions as a call back to Spacey Jane’s debut album, “Sunlight”, which saw the frontman package stories of heartbreak and family dysfunction into languid songs that could soundtrack a casual summer barbecue as much as they could a solo existential evening.
By the second album “Here Comes Everybody”, Harper had zoomed out. Done with the autobiographical, he tried to place himself in the shoes of the listener and curated a collection of observations, more than a monologue. But album number three brought him back to himself. Harper recalls one of his bandmates (Lane and Lama were not present for this interview) saying that this album feels like the most vulnerable, personal thing the band has ever written. “I think that’s probably true — not really intentionally, but that’s probably how it is,” he says.
“In the writing process I don’t think about how personal we get, and I regret that sometimes,” Harper says, noting that there are songs he cringes at the thought of certain people in his life listening to. “But at the time, it’s what makes sense to write, and it’s just free-flowing.”
“It’s the vulnerability that people are drawn to,” Hardman-Le Cornu says. “I think it’s what makes those songs. People find their own meaning and can just attach so deeply. They’re just fascinated by it and how it can compare to their own experiences.”
It was that vulnerability from which the “If That Makes Sense” takes its name. When the band sat down to write the album, there was no conscious throughline. “It was just like, here’s a bunch of ideas, here’s a bunch of feelings captured across two years of writing that span 28 years of life,” says Harper. “And here you go — if that makes sense, it’s like this.”
That idea bookends the album. A 33-second introduction is a distant-sounding instrumental that ends with a deep breath from Harper, him preparing the listener for a monologue in a way that signals a slight resignation in what he’s about to say. The final track, “August,” ends with vocals cooing, “If that makes sense…”.
“There was something about it — like when you pour your heart out and you say these things, you sort of discount it by saying, ‘Well, if that makes sense?’,” says Harper. “It’s this way of almost undermining your thoughts to make sure no one takes it too seriously.”
Kieran Lama. Photograph by Cole Barash.
Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu. Photograph by Cole Barash.
Despite the name, “If That Makes Sense” was a wholly intentional construction, and the first album the band created outside of Australia. They set up camp in Los Angeles in 2022, signed with their label and gained access to some of the best songwriters in the music business, including Sarah Aarons (whose previous credits include “I miss you, I’m sorry” by Gracie Abrams, “Jaded” by Miley Cyrus and Rosé’s “stay a little longer) who co-wrote the broody “How to Kill Houseplants,” and Mike Crossey, who produced the album (Crossey’s previous collaborators include indie-rock royals such as The Arctic Monkeys, The 1975 and Two Door Cinema Club). It was amazing, they say, although, once the honeymoon period wore off, a sharp exit from their comfort zone was confronting and ultimately, conducive to a new way of working.
“That sort of discomfort and duress helped us make a really good record, because it felt like we had to be so intentional,” says Harper. “[We knew] we were here with a very singular goal, which is not the case when we’re home, you know, piss-farting around Australia, doing whatever.”
Harper began writing in February 2022, and by March 2024 they had finished recording, which was followed by five months of tracking and pre-production.
“We very much wanted to get it really right,” says Harper. “In the past, we haven’t been as fortunate to be able to take the time to do that. The last record was made in four months, and it was extremely stressful. There are so many things I would change about that — and I’m sure I’ll look back [and find] things I’d change about this, too — but I think we don’t want to have the sense that we left anything on the table.”
“We’ve got to live with it,” says Hardman-Le Cornu. “We tie ourselves up for the next two years, basically — it’s the songs we have to play over and over and over.”
“We had some of the wisdom that we garnered from those first two, like releasing them and then living with things that you left and certain reactions people would have,” says Hardman-Le Cornu. “This is what we do. This is the core thing. So we better get this right.”
Spacey Jane, Harper reflects, went from, “being this fun thing that four friends did very loosely for no money, and with so many dreams and hopes but no serious way of achieving them, to this extremely serious thing that dominates our lives entirely.”
Yet, on that unseasonably cold Sydney night playing to a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, they found themselves, if only for a night, back where it all began. In a way, the evening mirrored the arc of their third album: one that wasn’t supposed to make sense, but did just perfectly.
“If That Makes Sense” is out now.
