Again, one of the year’s best indie rock albums, comes courtesy of the Belair Lip Bombs, a Melbourne four-piece who write with a precision and attention to melody that could put hired-gun pop songwriters to shame. Their second album, following their 2023 debut Lush Life, Again looks set to establish the Lip Bombs – guitarist and vocalist Maisie Everett, bass player Jimmy Droughton, drummer Daniel Devlin and guitarist Mike Bradvica – as rising stars in Australia and far beyond. It’s the band’s first album for Jack White’s Third Man Records – Lush Life, released by the Frankston label Cousin Will, was reissued by Third Man last year – and the band are appreciative of this new, larger platform.
“It’s cool being part of a record release where people are going to hear it, whereas I think with the last record, [we] put it out without any expectations,” says Devlin, on a video call with Everett from Toronto, where the band are in the middle of a North American tour supporting Spacey Jane. “And sonically, we’ve pushed the sound into different directions, which is fun for us. It’ll be cool to see the response to that as well.”
The Belair Lip Bombs hail from Frankston, a suburb of Melbourne situated on the Mornington Peninsula, and cut their teeth playing at Singing Bird Studios, an all-ages venue and recording space around which a small, tight-knit community of bands has emerged. The band recorded their first two EPs – which were noisier and looser than either of their albums – there, and still see it as a vital community resource. “You kind of had to move to Melbourne if you wanted to play, so it’s great that something like Singing Bird existed for us,” Devlin says. “It’s pretty important for new bands that are coming up.”
The leap the band made between 2019’s Songs To Do Your Laundry To and Lush Life is remarkable – the songs became punchier and more driving; and Everett’s lyrics became more acerbic and deeply memorable, a quality she hones further on Again.
“From the first two EPs to Lush Life, I was growing up a bit – transitioning from being a teenager to being in our 20s, people in the band were getting into relationships and going through breakups, and we all did a lot of travelling,” Everett says. “I moved to Melbourne when I was 19, and living there got us a bit more connected with the scene, and probably helped us as a band in the early days.”
The Belair Lip Bombs stand out in the Melbourne scene, if only because their sound – sharp, clean and direct as it is – is a far cry from the post-punk or art rock that many of the bands in the city tend to play. “The Melbourne sound or whatever, I wasn’t really introduced to it until I was in my early 20s,” Everett says.
Her formative songwriting influences were more “crap pop-punk music from America” – which she says she struggles to listen to now – and classic 90s bands like Pavement. Devlin says the crossover among the four band members tends to be music from “when indie rock was in the charts in the mid-2000s”.
The band connected with Third Man at South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in 2024, and were struck by the fact that the label was “really passionate and cared about the songs,” Devlin says – as opposed to “other labels we’ve met, where they [only] see the streaming numbers or the marketability of a band.”
Having an international label removes one of the many barriers that Australian bands tend to face when breaking overseas. “For me, at least, it’s always been my ambition to turn this into a career,” Everett says. “That’s probably been the driving factor from the start.”
The band still all hold down jobs in Melbourne; Devlin says that he and, Droughton and Bradvica “love having a balance” between the band and everyday life, but “something shifted with the Third Man stuff and the new record – we’ve all got a bit more ambitious and more invested, and we want to give it as much of a shot as possible, because we don’t want to regret not giving it a proper crack”.
Everett says the band “spent years writing songs” ahead of Lush Life, in contrast to Again, where a lot more time was spent working out songs, restructuring and redefining them, in the studio. Even so, the songs on Again feel even more clarified, evidenced by the deft intensity of tracks like Again and Again and Price of a Man. Working with Joe White, from Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, “helped us tighten all the screws”, Everett says.
Devlin adds: “It was just nice having him in the room to support us – to build a bit of confidence in the band. When you’re trying to write a record that you know is coming out on a label for the first time, it was a little bit stressful – so it was nice having someone else there that could ease the pressure.”
Everett says: “You can’t really trust the opinions of your bandmates when you’re all fucking stuck in a room for 12 hours a day, right? Having a fifth person there to round everything out really helps.”
As so many other rising Australian bands have done before them, do they plan to move overseas now? “Spacey Jane, they all live in LA or whatever – it’s like, is that the only way? I don’t know,” Everett says. “We’ve been living in Melbourne so far … and everything’s sort of worked out!”
Again by the Belair Lip Bombs is out on 31 October. The Belair Lip Bombs are touring Europe until December, then Australia and the US in 2026
