ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER

Endless Rooms

SUB POP

8/10

Aussie guitar gang’s full potential epically realised. By Sharon O’Connell

AS for so many musicians, 2020 was a time of stasis and uncertainty for Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. The title of their third album, with its suggestion of maze-like entrapment, is the stuff of literal nightmares but also, one imagines, of the psychological effect of the world’s longest lockdown in Australia’s mismanaged pandemic. This record was born out of that time: singer and guitarist Tom Russo, one of three songwriters in the band, has admitted that a lot of his ideas “came from endlessly walking around the same streets of [Melbourne neighbourhood] West Brunswick”. Fran Keaney spent his weekends “building stuff on Garageband, writing without having any sense anybody would listen to it”.