The Belair Lip Bombs’ second album will detonate on Halloween. Again is one of the year’s best rock projects, patched together by four Melburnians under the banner of Jack White’s label, Third Man Records. I was put on to them after hearing the walloping lead single “Hey You,” a synth-punk anthem that infected my brain with chugging Springsteen guitars and bursting harmonies. It was like the War on Drugs singing a Crushing-era Julia Jacklin song. Vocalist Maisie Everett, in all of her confidence, shouts, “Motherfucker, just say what you mean!” while Mike Bradvica’s strobing guitars warp and capsize. Some things are just destined for perfection; “Hey You” was born with a gold medal pinned to it. If you go back to one of the first Lip Bombs releases, like the EP called Songs To Do Your Laundry To from 2019, you’d swear you’re hearing a different band completely.
The Belair Lip Bombs began in the coastal Frankston suburb eight years ago, after Everett and Bradvica graduated high school. They weren’t always friends but eventually reconnected. “I don’t think we knew anyone else who played music, so we just had each other,” Everett tells me. She worked at a music shop where bassist Jimmy Droughton was giving guitar lessons, and she welcomed him in shortly after. Drummer Daniel “Dev” Devlin, who grew up in Frankston too, joined later, after the band released their first album, Lush Life, in 2023. Some of them took lessons of their own growing up, but Everett says Australian schools put a larger focus on orchestra music, and classes weren’t “really a thing for people that were into alternative music.” So they turned to Frankston’s small DIY community, especially the all-ages Singing Bird Studio. “It’s one of the only live music venues in that part of Melbourne,” Dev says. “A lot of cool bands center around that venue and that recording space.” The biggest name thrown around is Eddy Current Suppression Ring, though that band is still majorly underground.
When I meet the band, they’re midway through their inaugural American tour (their first appearance in the States was at South by Southwest in 2024, alongside fellow Australians dust), playing support for Spacey Jane. Though a couple of gigs got cancelled after Everett was hit by an illness, they’ve been able to enjoy “lots of good drives.” Spending a month on the road in a brand new country is a tall task, but it helps that Australia is practically impossible to cover on just one tour. “Playing your first show in Sydney as a Melbourne band is a massive deal, because it’s a 9-hour drive or an hour-and-a-half flight,” Dev admits. “And it’s expensive, to get there and build a following outside of your own little bubble.” Early Lip Bombs shows included opening for Hockey Dad, the Living End, and Tired Lion, which Everett calls “a pretty good head-start” for their first years as a band. “That helped us make a name for ourselves in Frankston, and then we all moved up to Melbourne.” The quartet is firmly based there now but still return to Frankston to rehearse when the coast is calling out to them. That’s “part of their backstory,” as Everett puts it.
The other piece of their backstory is the name, which comes from an American brand of skateboard wheels with “phenomenal rebound,” as an old advertisement insists. Everett’s dad, who was a skater in the UK but obsessed with the Dogtown and Z-boy skaters in 1980s California, suggested the name. “He knew about all these really small skateboard brands, and he somehow just knew about this skate wheel that was made in California in the seventies called Belair Lip Bombs,” she remembers.
“Did you pick up skating at all, or was that your dad’s thing?” I ask Everett.
“I skated a lot with my dad when I was a kid,” she recalls. “But I never got fully into it. I was never that good, and now I’m too scared. I would love to keep skating, but I’m too scared of breaking my fucking wrist.”
“When you get older,” Droughton chimes in, “you realize your own mortality.”
“Yeah,” Dev agrees, “and we’re all just posers, as well.”
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The Belair Lip Bombs make “yearn-core” music, a sub-genre they (now-regrettably) coined themselves while running on fumes at the beginning of the Again press cycle. “We did this interview with triple j and I think we’d had, like, maybe four or five hours of sleep, because we got up so early to get a flight to Sydney for a gig,” Dev says. “We had multiple interviews, and you can tell we’re all pretty tired in that video. They got some gold out of us, because it’s been in a lot of press releases.” Everett thinks that, at some point, she called the Lip Bombs’ sound “limerence rock” and changed it to “yearn-core” later on. They both convey the same thing, this feeling she gets from a lot of the songs she writes—a “sense of desperation,” as she puts it. “If someone asks you about what kind of music you play, it’s hard to put a label on it, sometimes,” she admits. “It can be funny to just say something stupid.” Some things just stick.
But the band, Dev says, isn’t precious about labels or comparisons. That’s probably because they can’t even describe what it is that they’re doing. “Some bands get a bit caught up in being like, ‘We’re this! We have to sound like this!’ I don’t think we ever really cared about that.” It’d be hard to condense the Lip Bombs’ ideas on Again into to just one thing, anyways. There was an effort, Dev adds, to make the record more “polished-sounding,” because the band had more time to record and a budget to blow. What he’s getting at is: the Lip Bombs were broke when they made Lush Life. This time? Less so. “With Lush Life, we went in being like, ‘Okay, these are the songs we’ve got. Let’s record them.’ There was a lot more thought that went into this record,” Everett acknowledges. “Even months before we started recording, we spoke a lot about how we wanted to approach it and how we wanted it to sound. We still wanted to have a sense of authenticity. We wanted to carry that over to Again.”
“I think what we did quite well on this album is focus on the ten songs we’re putting out,” Droughton adds. “Each of them have their own unique identity, and we really tried to push every song down its own path and make them unique from each other. We explored a lot of ideas but, in Lush Life, it was more linear, the progression of the album. This one is varied and exciting.” In our conversation, Droughton makes a good point about the Belair Lip Bombs, saying that it’s always been about “four people in a room writing songs.” They’re not the type to sit at a computer and make a record, preferring to “repeat ideas until they sound good” and feed off each other’s energy. The Lip Bombs are a live band first, because they’ve been playing shows for eight years, Bradvica adds, and that’s what powers the spirit of Again. “We have our live set locked in, and we’re honing that aspect of it [in the studio].”
Bridie Fizgerald
Making Again, the Lip Bombs worked with an outside producer for the first time. They called on Rolling Blackouts Coast Fever’s Joe White and programming wiz Nao Anzai to produce and engineer the album. Talking with her friends in other bands, Everett got the sense that a lot of producers “have creative input, but others take a bit more of a step back.” White fits into the latter, Droughton confirms. ““At the start, he said, ‘Hey, I’ll do whatever you guys want. I’m not here to put my stamp on it. What do you need from me?’”
“Coming into it, Joe was a big fan of Lush Life, and he wanted to be involved in some way,” Dev says. “We got a beer with him and hung out; he really liked the demos that we had. From there, we built a relationship with him where we felt more comfortable in our ideas and our parts and songs, and he was a good addition to the group. He was really supportive to Maisie and all of her parts—vocals, lyrics, guitar parts, tones, things like that. For me and Jimmy, he really helped us iron out the rhythms. It was good having another voice there.”
“When it’s just the four of us in the room recording, it’s so easy to get caught up in little things or get fatigued from doing the same thing over and over again,” Everett admits. “Having someone else in there to observe everything from an outside perspective was super beneficial to us. He helped bring out the best in our ideas.”
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Those ideas are aplenty. Take a track like the moody, mid-tempo “Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair),” which has been in the band’s setlist for almost two years: Everett’s singing is a blockbuster, and the riffs curling around her spill out of guitars brined by a saga of unpredictable volumes. Alex Lahey came up with the “you gotta make your own luck” line, and the twin-guitar chords twist, shriek, and crash into honky-tonk bedlam around it. The music on Again is a bluesy hailstorm of porch-playing impulse inspired by the likes of Television and Pavement. “Hey You” incorporates electronic elements that the Lip Bombs only flirted with on Lush Life. “I bought a digital piano during COVID,” Everett recalls. “I got piano lessons when I was a kid, and then I started playing guitar and abandoned it for a while. But I’ve just been playing a lot of keys and piano on my own time for a couple of years, so it felt natural.” And they laid it down fast. “We played the first 2/3s off the bat; Maisie was playing that arpeggiated intro,” Droughton explains. “I don’t think we felt any anxiety with having such a poppy, electronic song. We believed in it.”
And these songs are massive even as the album awakens. “Again and Again” is a genuinely big opener, and “Burning Up” is a well-placed, powerful ballad contrasted by the glossy guitar drama of “Cinema” and punkish brevity curdling in “Another World.” But the centerpiece of Again is the rambling and rollicking “If You’ve Got The Time.” The song, which was inspired by Everett’s then-obsession with Geese’s 3D Country, is the Belair Lip Bombs’ attempt to build a dynamic, catchy, “classic rock kind of sound” akin to, say, the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden,” where Everett’s vocals swerve, collapse, and multiply against bouncing, repeating guitar riffs and Bradvica’s backing harmony. Eventually, the whole thing erupts into a highway song, with a solo ripping through the foreground like the hand of God.
Bridie Fizgerald
Everett’s writing on Again is great and acerbic; the Weezer-honoring “Back Of My Hand” is an especially good barometer for her craft, flashing humor and sincerity generously: “Like the sun in the morning, a piano falling from the sky: I knew I was doomed when I saw you, and it hit me in the face like a pie.” Her imposter syndrome still knocks, she clarifies, but that she’s gotten much better at worrying less about “creating a narrative” since making Lush Life, because “the words that come out end up having a meaning anyway.” When she sits behind the piano on “Burning Up” and sings, “Talking out my ass about love to someone I hardly know, I’m the king of biding my time just to piss around at home,” I do wonder where that came from. But I don’t bother asking her about it, because I get the sense that Everett tells her stories first and then lives through them later.
Even though they’re almost a decade into this, the Lip Bombs are still an underground band without much of an ego. They’re awkward on stage, not totally rehearsed in doing banter between songs, but they’ll pull you apart with foot-tapping rock and roll. And you pick up on that when you’re in a room with these four people, this sense of authenticity not yet corrupted by a decent record deal or petty arguments but colored by talent and friendship. “We’re confident in just being ourselves. When we get to play, we feel really lucky. It’s good to remind yourself of that, when you’re in the middle of a long tour,” Dev says, before cracking up: “We’re not that sort of band that will do a backflip on stage, or something.” There’s the music you make and the character you become when you play it. The Belair Lip Bombs, I’d reckon, don’t do much of the latter. These are longtime pals looking to make a good time out of some good tunes. And there’s no hierarchy between them, Everett tells me. “We all see each other as equals. At the end of the day, we all have the same common goal, and that’s to make the best music we can and have fun while we’re doing it.”
Again is out October 31 via Third Man Records.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
