Dream On, Dreamer: Lucid

Tomorrow, all eyes will be on Dream On, Dreamer when sophomore record Loveless hits the ARIA chart. In the past ten months their label mates Buried In Verona, Amity Affliction and Northlane dropped industry jaws when they debuted inside the ARIA Top 20 – the latter two charted inside the Top 3. But while independent label UNFD are pushing Australian hardcore through the glittery hymen of mainstream acceptance, the Melbourne band are on a private path of self-discovery.

“That’s us in a way,” says frontman Marcel Gadacz. “We’re breaking out and moving on to our own community.”

He’s on the phone from his parent’s house, 100k outside of Berlin,and talking about the LP’s artwork: two opposing Ls cutting through a circle he says represents the world. “We have this culture of music and that’s what we’re trying to aim for,” he states, not just talking about his design anymore, “breaking out of that circle and becoming ourselves, being apart from the masses.”

While Dream On, Dreamer have spent the better part of the past two years on the road, touring Australia, the U.S., Asia and Europe, Gadacz was searching for solitude. The 25-year-old nullified romance, a decision which he says opened creative floodgates and triggered the title track.

“I wanted to be by myself without being distracted by another individual. I didn’t want to be falling in love with anybody – I wanted to love myself first. It’s not a bad thing,” he quickly adds. “A lot of people tag it with depression but I choose to be in this position where I change loneliness to aloneness.

“There’s so much time that you should spend on yourself just working out how life works, or how your mind works, or how relationships are formed with new people. That’s something that people neglect and that’s exactly what I did.”

Today’s release of Loveless, a musically cohesive, lyrically schizophrenic collection produced and mixed by the band’s guitarist Callan Orr, further blueprints their adamantine resolve to unify the alienated. It’s this constant overarch that bridges 2011 debutHomebound and their two early EPs (2009’s Sails Set, Armada and 2010’s Hope), and keeps Gadacz on an almost pathological quest of altruism. Loveless, written entirely at night, preaches of integrity and insecurity all in the same verse; it’s a battering ram stream-of-consciousness laden with the tenets of standard morality.

“Through writing lyrics I’ve sort of just become stronger,” he says warmly. “That’s that message that I want to put across with Lovelessas well, that people who like the songs can really relate to it in a way that they have to be ambitious about their lives, they can’t just wait for the wave. We’re not a band that sits around getting wasted in the club, that’s just not us, that’s not the message that we’re trying to get across. It doesn’t do anything.

“[The message] should be about the relationships you form between human beings, the way we treat each other and love, the way we build relationships. It’s about friendship,” he stops himself. “I could go on about it for hours.”

Ironically, questions about the friendship between band members have surrounded the album release. Dream On, Dreamer parted ways with vocalist Michael ‘McCoy’ McLeod and rhythm guitarist Luke Domic late last year, keyboardist Daniel Jungwirth was moved to bass and the band have since replaced McLeod with friend Zachary Britt (The Dream The Chase). However, Gadacz says both departures were amicable; during the record’s pre-production stage in late 2012, McLeod announced his girlfriend was pregnant, forcing the band to seek a replacement.

“We just knew that he wasn’t in the right headspace […] We separated us from McCoy because we wanted him to be there for his child and wanted the child to grow up the right way and not have his father being away all the time.” The band then called on Domic to take on vocal duties, but the guitarist opted to bow out cordially. “We knew he had a good singing voice so we put a bit of pressure on him,” Gadacz says openly. “He said to us that he was not really up for that, that he wouldn’t be good and sort of would be letting us down. So he stepped out, which is respectable in a way.”

Britt’s addition came just as the band were to embark on a 30-date European tour. And while the band are now a very different beast dynamically – superficially as a five-piece and more thoughtfully as an increased collaborative outfit, Gadacz considers Britt’s inclusion fated.

“We always wanted to tour with [The Dream The Chase] but management told us we weren’t allowed to because our band names are too similar,” he laughs. “We even made a joke about it two years ago about what would happen if we got together.”

Details of Domic’s departure are not sensational; it came with well wishes and a genuine determination to stay in touch. But perhaps it’s a language barrier – Gadacz moved to Melbourne from Germany in 2007 to study Graphic Design and form a band – that portrays his next sentence under a frigid light: “Luke I’d say was never a person that made any decisions or had any huge impact on our music. That’s why it didn’t change anything, it wasn’t that he was writing any more music.”

For all the misinterpretations attached to it, Loveless has an ostensible relevance because it isn’t afraid to mix signals and show fans The Man Behind The Curtain. It’s clear the record is a cathartic release for Gadacz, it has already created a certain reverence from the restless inner-workings of the Internet. No matter what its ARIA chart placing,Loveless already has culture currency – social and genre divides have long been an issue of past history.

“If I don’t get a Top 20 debut I’m not going to be sad about it my whole life. […] It’s obviously good if people buy it but you have no control over that anyway, what people do is up to them. I just want our music to spread as far and as wide as possible. I just want to have people coming to our shows and supporting us.”