The Rions talk vulnerability, touring, and their debut album

WE CAUGHT UP WITH THE RIONS BACKSTAGE AR THE FINAL GIG OF THEIR EU/UK TOUR TO TALK ABOUT TURNING MESSY FEELINGS INTO MUSIC, SAYING THE UNSAID, AND HOW IT FEELS TO IMMORTALISE YOUR EARLY TWENTIES ON A DEBUT ALBUM. FROM SONGS THAT SKIRT THE EDGE OF OVER-SHARING AND THE COMEDOWN OF LIFE AFTER TOUR, TO TIKTOK AND PUB FOOD, WE DIVE INTO VULNERABILITY, GROWING UP TOGETHER, AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE FRIENDS FIRST WHILE THE WORLD AROUND THEM GETS BIGGER, LOUDER AND A LOT MORE REAL.

Asher, Noah, Tom, and Harley

ANOMIE: Hey guys! So, you've written about infatuation, rage, forgiveness, self-sabotage, growing up… all quite big emotional topics for people in their early twenties. How do you know when a feeling is song-worthy or whether it's something you just need to feel privately?

HARLEY: I think there's a way to write about every feeling, there is a way to word it…. that's actually a really great question. I think that's kind of been the core of the process of making the album. Figuring out what we can and can't say. I feel like for us, it's less of a question because there are heavier subjects on the album than infatuation, for example. You almost need to find a reason not to talk about it. At some point you think, maybe people hear this too much and it's cliché and everyone falls in love, whatever. When it comes to relationships and connections between family members and experiences like that, that's when you start to consider like… would it become messy if I was to talk about this? Is it worth sharing this feeling with the world at the expense of people I care about? If you communicate it properly, the song won't damage a relationship that matters, but it will transcend what you experience within that relationship to other people that might relate to it. I think that’s what makes it worth it, taking that step to talk about really heavy things. There's so many people out there who are going to get it and be able to connect with it. Even if it's not in the way you intended, they relate to it in their own way and that's really cool as well. Interpretation. Cool.

ANOMIE: With that, you've spoken a lot about vulnerability as a band. Do you find that it's quite therapeutic to be that way musically?

NOAH: Yeah. Absolutely. Being in the studio this time around and writing this album was just like a group therapy session, it was like doing it in our own way. Obviously we're super close and we have been for years, and finding ways to communicate this kind of stuff through music is really cool. We were able to do it in such a way that we didn't need to talk about it, but we could all feel it together. It was really fun. You kind of end up talking about things when you write about it anyway.

HARLEY: What I’ve found personally is that even if I don’t realise it at the time, when I write a song about something I’ve experienced and how it makes me feel, hearing Noah sing a month later will hit me and I’ll think, “I relate to this song so much, this is so me. Oh my God.” I think that’s what we want fans to feel, that it can shine a light on a specific way they feel. And the fact that we can do that for ourselves… we’re just so lucky we can.

ANOMIE: Do you feel there’s any cost to that, mentally or in your relationships? TOM: No, I don't think so. I think we’re close enough that there was never any kind of negative outcome.

HARLEY: I can speak to an experience of writing songs about a connection with someone that I was very close with. The song touches on… all the things that you should say to them, but you don't, which was super strange because then I showed them the song. That could have gone terribly, but luckily they're super mature and very graceful for, you know, letting me be such a dick in that way. I expected it to go terribly and it just completely changed the relationship for the better. I was terrified at that moment. Beyond that, just like opening up and saying stuff you probably should have said at the time.

NOAH: Yeah. It can be so much easier to speak through lyrics.

HARLEY: It was so nice to hear. They were like, “By the way, I would never hold it against you, I understand that this is your emotional expression or artistic expression or whatever. It's how you communicate.” Which is great because not everyone sees it that way. You know, some people will hear a song and just be like, “Why didn't you just say that to my face?”. So we've been pretty lucky with the responses we've had in our personal lives.

NOAH: We’ve been even luckier with fans feeling the same way about the songs.

ANOMIE: That's special. You've been touring the past couple of weeks, with tonight in Amsterdam being your last show of the tour.

TOM: Yeah. It's a big deal.

ANOMIE: Do you find that all of the travelling feeds your creativity, or can it be draining? NOAH: I think the time between releases is when we get to experience things and find stuff to write about. So between this album and whatever our next project is, whatever happens is basically fuel for the fire. Everything we experience on this tour, whether it’s fun or sad, becomes something to write about.

HARLEY: I feel like for me, it’s actually very similar to being in a relationship, the whole “distance makes the heart grow fonder” thing. I find that incredibly relatable both in my relationships and with writing music. I might be at home for months waiting to tour, and during all that time I could be recording and writing, but I’m not. Then we go away, and suddenly I can’t wait to go home and keep writing because I have so much to say and so much creative energy to release. That’s always a plus. It’s sad when tours end, you don’t always want to go home, but I always have that to look forward to personally. You’re refuelling.

ANOMIE: Do you find your writing changes depending on whether you’re at home or on the road?

NOAH: Yeah. I feel like when we’re on tour, we don't write as much. We're playing shows and travelling, and we barely get a second to sit down and actually write a song. We do go on writing trips, and I feel like we definitely have a different system of writing that works really well when the four of us are pitching in, especially when we write with our producer, Chris Collins. You get some really cool songs out of it when you have five minds working creatively together.

HARLEY: I've probably only actually written one full song on tour before. Funnily enough, it was actually the last time we were in Amsterdam, which is a wild coincidence. On that tour we had wanted to get an acoustic guitar to film covers to post online, which we didn't end up doing a lot of anyway. We had bought this little tiny guitar which I just sort of fiddled with between shows on the tour bus. When we were in Amsterdam, I wrote a song when I had time to myself in the venue and we had a day off… that song will probably never see the light of day, but it was nice to be able to find a quiet corner and do that. The song was about being away from home and how that had influenced things that I was doing. That was very interesting for me because I wouldn't have written that while I was back home.

ANOMIE: When you're touring, it can feel like you're going a million miles an hour. When you get home and you're kind of on that come down, how do you deal with it?

NOAH: There's multiple ways, I feel like relationships are pretty important. Seeing people, seeing each other.

HARLEY: I struggle with the come down of touring.

NOAH: Oh yeah, totally.

HARLEY: I don't really find a way that I can cope with it at all, other than just waiting for it to pass or waiting for the next tour. I feel like for Tom and I, if we're on a long tour and it gets tiring, we can't wait to be home. And then we go home, and at least for me, after two days, three days of full rest, I'm like, okay, I'm bored now. I'm going to go out. So quick.

NOAH: Personally, I do the stuff that I miss when I'm on tour. You realise things that you miss from home. Walking down the beach, going for a swim or just cruising, having a day off. Stuff like that. I miss touring a lot because I feel like we haven't done a tour that has fully drained us yet. I do get the feeling that when we get back, I'm already ready to go again. For the last tour and for this tour, the case is that we will be going back on the road again soon. We have a festival tour when we get home. Only two weeks off, which is great.

HARLEY: We all spent 20 years in the same town, living right around the corner from each other. I love that and wouldn't change that, but I don't need long there before I feel like I'm ready to go somewhere else again.

NOAH: I'll walk my girlfriend's dog or just watch TV or something, but you have a couple of days and you're pretty ready to go out again. I feel like we don't get to do a lot of exercise on tour, or eat healthy.

TOM: I’m looking forward to healthy food.

NOAH: Literally the first thing I want to do when I get home is go to the gym and eat healthy. When you're on tour you’re so lazy, it's crazy.

ANOMIE: Do you miss the food back home?

NOAH: Not as much when we’re here in Amsterdam. In the UK I definitely do.

TOM: Everything's fried and it's expensive. You can quote me on that, I want all the smoke. The UK food is bad.

NOAH: If you go to the pub in Australia, you get something like a steak or a schnitzel, and it comes with a salad. In the UK it’s all fries or beans. There's no salad that comes with anything from the pub. So we were going out and looking for healthy food at some point in the UK, yeah.

TOM: Salad bars just don't exist there.

NOAH: There's a great salad bar in our town, I feel like that's all the takeaway I'm going to get (shoutout Banana Blossom). HARLEY: I’m excited to eat an apple.

NOAH: Eat an apple! I think there's one there. I'm going to have that later.

HARLEY: Oh my God. When we got to the airport here, after being in the UK for two weeks, I hadn't seen a fruit or vegetable in a while. We walk into the airport and there's a fruit market, and we're like, oh my God. Salvation. Salvation!

ANOMIE: Did you grab anything?

HARLEY: No [laughs]. We're not healthy yet, we're not home… but we can appreciate it. TOM: It’s nice to have the option to turn it down at least.

ANOMIE: When you think back to the early days when you were rehearsing in bedrooms and garages, what has changed with your creative chemistry? What’s stayed the same?

HARLEY: I think as a whole, it's only gotten stronger.

NOAH: Yeah. We definitely find what works and what doesn't.

HARLEY: I think we've learned to understand all of our individual skills and styles with writing, and just playing in general. With that understanding, we kind of mesh more and it just works. I think there was a long learning period of trying to write all together, but sometimes we would just butt heads a little bit.

TOM: Or we’d just get unproductive. We would just dissolve into hanging out.

HARLEY: Yeah, that was a big problem for a while.

TOM: There was about two years of that. We used to practice in Asher's garage and it was just a playground full of things you could just have fun with, you know. There was gym equipment, a boxing bag, skateboards, and the basketball hoop outside. If we were trying to write or rehearse or whatever, we'd last maybe an hour and then we'd just be doing stupid shit.

HARLEY: I think overall, at least from my point of view, watching the other three guys grow, we've all just gotten a lot better and more confident. That's changed the dynamic quite directly. When we're writing and just having the confidence to suggest ideas, or the skill/confidence to be like, “I love that, let's expand on that”. That's been really cool to watch because, you know, in the early days, none of us really knew what we were doing.

NOAH: We used to say, “What would the Beatles do in this scenario?”, or “What would Lime Cordiale do?” But now I feel like our music knowledge has grown so much, we trust ourselves a bit more.

HARLEY: The more we do it, the more we're finding that our sound, for lack of a better word, is becoming more recognizable to us. We'd never been able to tell what the Rions sounded like, so I think it's kind of exciting when we write a song now and we go “Wow, this sounds a lot like a Rions song”.

TOM: We've never been the type of people to like, nail it down and be like, “Oh, it has to feel like a Rions song”. But now we kind of understand it a bit more.

ANOMIE: It sounds like you're not constricting yourselves to a specific sound. NOAH: Yeah. That would be my worst nightmare.

TOM: Having 600 songs that all sound the same.

HARLEY: Just being safe, I think, has always been unattractive to us.

ANOMIE: Massive congrats on the debut album! You said this album felt like maybe your first real start as a band, what do you think the minivan-era version of yourselves would think about this? HARLEY: I don't think they'd be able to comprehend it.

TOM: I think we would love it, but I think we would have been like, “How did we do that?” I think we were just inexperienced with writing all together and how we could combine our skills. That just would have been unbelievable like… “How did we do that?”

NOAH: At the time, I wouldn't have sung the way I did on this album. I wouldn't have been like, “That's a cool song, let's put that on the album”. I’d like to think that if I listened to it over and over again, I'd be like, “Fuck, this is so cool” and the album would become one of my favourite albums.

HARLEY: Another great question, by the way. Looking back, there are elements of that EP that I still can appreciate. But at the end of the day, if you compare a song like Minivan to almost any song on this album, it's like the maturity and the skill and the thought and the intention and everything behind it just blows it out of the park. Minivan is to me now, personally, a bit simple and cheesy. Even though we kind of knew that at the time, we were less problematic about it.

TOM: Oh my god. This question is really making me think, I really like it. There's so much shit in this album that we wrote about that we would have had no idea it happened. So we would be listening to it like, “Oh my fucking God, who is this about?”. Hectic. Some of those songs on Minivan were from year 10 at school.

NOAH: Imagine listening to, like, “Oh How Hard It Is To Be 20” back then, oh my God. “

ANOMIE: Our next question is actually about that particular track. It feels like it's such a snapshot of young adulthood, very relatable. Do you feel like you've gotten any “better” at being in your 20s since you wrote it?

TOM: I think in terms of my personal opinion on your 20s, as a general statement, your 20s are kind of the time that you're not really meant to be good at your 20s. You're never meant to be good in your 20s, maybe the back end.

HARLEY: Yeah, I think that's the point of the song. You spend way too much time thinking about morality and what you're going to do wrong and not being 20 that you forget that you are currently 20. It's all about looking forward to the future, worrying about how you're going to look when you're 60. You shouldn't care about that, but the fact that you do is just a testament to the fact that you are that age now and it's actually fine.

NOAH: I was also going to say I feel like the decade of being 20, more than every other decade in your life, is the decade that everyone at that same age is so different. Everyone will be so different, so I feel like there's no one way to do it. It's like I don't think anyone will ever be decent at it.

ANOMIE: It seems like you guys are doing pretty okay at it.

NOAH: Thank you, thanks. Someone could have a successful business in their 20s and people will say they're doing it “right”, I'm doing the finger quotations for the readers [laughs]. But they might not have any personal time, and by the time they reach their 30s, they might feel like they wasted their 20s building that business. There’s never really a right way to do it, and I don’t think you can ever truly be “good” at it.

ANOMIE: If you played your track “Cry” in a pub full of the guys that it's about, what reactions do you imagine they'd have?

HARLEY: [laughs] I don't think they'd get it. They’d just think it was a shit song.

NOAH: I was thinking about this when we were in the UK. There were a few times I’d go out and see the exact guys we’re literally singing about, you know, the whole “lads, lads, lads,” real locker-room-talk types. And I kept thinking, if any of them came to a show, I’d hope they’d listen and something would switch. Or maybe they’d be about to go do something, you know, knobbish, and then suddenly go, “Actually… I’m gonna hold off.”

HARLEY: I think in reality if it was a room full of them, they would listen to the lyrics and be like, “Wow, that's deep…I'm glad I'm not like that”.

NOAH: 100%.

ANOMIE: The album has a thread of choosing to care even if it hurts. If the album leaves people with one feeling, what do you hope it would be?

NOAH: Sure. Oh wow…reflective, I think.

HARLEY: No, I think they did the reflecting while they were listening to it, and again at the end of the album. I think… maybe I’ve said this before in an article, but I'll say it differently this time because this is an exclusive. I want this album to leave people with the feeling that they want to call that certain person and finally say the thing they've been wanting to say. Whether it’s, “Hey, I don't want you in my life anymore, I want to choose being happy,” or “Hey, I'm in love with you,” or “Hey, let's be friends,” we just want the album to be that final push into action, the thing someone might need when they’re sitting on the fence about committing to someone or not.

NOAH: That's a good way to put it.

ANOMIE: Making a debut album could maybe make or break some friendships, but it seems like yours has gotten stronger. What did you learn about each other when you were making the record that you didn’t know before?

NOAH: I feel like Asher, who isn't here, is quite an exclusive person, just in general.

TOM: Keeps his cards close to his chest.

NOAH: Exactly, so seeing him open up was really cool. We talk about our experiences in the album, and obviously I'm singing what these guys have experienced. We've always been quite open with each other because we're closer to being brothers than we are best mates, so I feel like it's re-experiencing what I saw them go through in a different light. In a more accepting light or a more, you know, reflective light. That was really cool to do.

TOM: I think also, because we're all best mates and we love hanging out with each other in general it’s very easy to get lost in having fun with your friends and making stupid jokes. When we wrote the album, you kind of realise how much emotion everyone has [laughs]. It was like damn, even though we were just shadowboxing outside or doing some stupid shit, we're actually all very emotional people. It just brings that side out, which is very interesting.

HARLEY: Just seeing from each of our perspectives how much the other three have grown since high school, having known each other since we were like eight years old. Being able to look at each other and go, whoa, you're 21 now, you've done all these things, and when I'm not thinking about you, you still have your own thoughts. Like, you’re not just a figment of my upbringing, you’re a whole ass dude.

ANOMIE: Can you remember a show you played where people were singing your lyrics back at you and you felt like you’d moved beyond being a local band?

NOAH: I'd say it was definitely our first headline tour that we played in Melbourne, hearing people sing our lyrics back to us in a different state was crazy. Also, seeing someone sing a song back to us or be a fan on our first time to Europe was ridiculous. Mainly it was that first headline tour that we were like, “Should we try and sell tickets to our own show, not in our local town or not in Sydney?”. That was wild.

HARLEY: I think a recent one for me personally is something that, at its heart, I think we all find quite stupid and it kind of represents a larger issue around musicians and TikTok. I think it's easy to complain about having to do social media, but there's nice parts as well. There’s been a dance for one of our songs, “Lobby Calls”, that people have been doing at shows, which is really cute. In Bournemouth, at the first show of the tour, a girl in the front row did the dance, and at that moment I was like, whoa. To me, it really shows not just the reach of social media, but it’s also a testament to the existence of the Rions community.

ANOMIE: With TikTok being such a huge force in music over the past five years, do you ever feel pressured to play into it?

NOAH: Yes, totally. I feel like the business side of it definitely pressures you to do it.

HARLEY: There was a crossroads at the end of making the album where we had to decide: no, we haven’t written an album that lends itself to a 10-second TikTok hook, but that was never the point of being musicians for us. So we made a conscious choice there. In general, I think my ideology has evolved to: there’s no point complaining, because it’s not going to change it. You just have to do it. We’re so privileged. I think the bigger issue is that things like TikTok melt down people’s attention spans and take away the importance and the point of music. But unless someone destroys the TikTok servers and demolishes social media as we know it, that isn’t going to change. So… whatever.

TOM: I also think we’re lucky in the sense that we’ve always had a shared love for film and making videos. When we were 12, we’d run around filming Star Wars videos and Spider-Man videos and all this bullshit. It was fun, we loved it. And now, in the least weird way, this is just the adult version of that.

ANOMIE: When you’re in your 70’s and look back on this era, what do you hope sticks with you?

NOAH: I hope I still like the music. I love the songs that we did on the album, so I hope I still like it.

TOM: I would hope that we were still friends like we were back at this age, you know. I hope we're all alive.

HARLEY: Yeah, yeah, we'll be doing some wicked shit at 70, that's for sure. NOAH: I want to be really into bowling on the greens, lawn bowls. A lot of old people do it, it's very much a part of Australian pub culture. It seems like quite a time. I'd also like to just like to listen to the album again after 50 years and smile while I play a round of golf.

HARLEY: Yeah, that's aspirational. I hope to be playing a lot of golf when I'm 70, that's going to become my life.

ANOMIE: You've played in Amsterdam before, how does it feel being back? Any thoughts on the Netherlands musically or in general?

TOM: Last time we were here, at the end of summer, it was really hot, and now it’s freezing and there are Christmas decorations everywhere, which is so picturesque. I’ve never had a cold Christmas before, since it’s the middle of summer in Australia.

NOAH: I don't think we’ve experienced the music side of things as much, we haven't been to a show here.

HARLEY: It just seems very artistic in general.

NOAH: Super artistic, which is really cool.

ANOMIE: When you look ahead as a band, what are you most excited for? Any specific goals in mind?

HARLEY: The music.

NOAH: Yeah, I think just writing and releasing more music, playing bigger and better shows, meeting amazing people. I'm really excited to see who we might work with one day.

HARLEY: I'm excited to become the thing that we see in bands that we're fans of. They inspire us to be artistic and express ourselves, and if we can do that for masses of people, that would be crazy. Or just one person, that's cool.

TOM: Also being rich would be pretty cool, having a Lamborghini doesn't seem so bad. Second to the art!

ANOMIE: Any dream musicians that you guys would like to work with?

HARLEY: Oh, there's so many. The 1975.

TOM: Sam Fender, Lizzie McAlpine, Olivia Dean.

NOAH: She's so cool. I just want to be in a room and listen to her sing, and then I'll just feel really embarrassed and I won't sing myself.

ANOMIE: Lastly, what kind of energy are you hoping to bring to the stage tonight? What are you hoping the crowd gives you back for your last show of the tour?

NOAH: This is our fifth show in a row.

HARLEY: So we're gonna give everything.

TOM: We're gonna give everything we can because it's the last show of the tour.

NOAH: Definitely gonna end it with a bang. I'm hoping I can get through it with my voice intact as well, but I think I'm gonna have so much fun. It's the last show of the tour, it's always great.

@THERIONSBAND

GIVE THE BOYS’ DEBUT ALBUM ‘EVERYTHING EVERY SINGLE DAY’ A LISTEN, OUT NOW IN EU RETAIL STORES