The Gooch Palms are riled up and ready to share their new single, “Great Dividing Rage”, out independently February 5. It comes ahead of their national tour support for UK band, The Stranglers this February.

On “Great Dividing Rage” The Gooch Palms explore the social rift currently driving Australians apart. It sees the band return to the gritty and aggressive sound the duo cultivated back in 2013 with the release of their debut album, NOVO’S, while once again, relishing in their DIY, punk roots. 

Leroy Macqueen and Kat Friend, usually known for their quirky pop anthems, dive head first into this political hotbed with an accompanying newsreel video showing just how extreme these past few months have been in Australia. Not ones to shy away from a political topic, their aim with this new track is to unite us over the current, tragic state of our country and hopefully move forward, together.

Evidently frustrated with the current set of events, the band note, “everyone is aware of what’s currently going on here. Everyone knows we’re dealing with unprecedented bushfires raging across the whole country, crippling drought which seems endless, violent wind, rain, hail or dust storms every other day and flash floods when it does rain. Our waterways are full of ash and our air is now often toxic. Over a billion native animals have already perished within a couple of brutal months, thousands of homes destroyed and too many lives lost. With no plans from our useless government, no real answers from the opposition, people marching in the streets begging for action and others fighting in the comment sections on social media, the great dividing rage of Australia has well and truly reached boiling point. We felt an immediate need to write a song to express our feelings about the whole situation. We’re just too angry to sit here quietly anymore. We have a platform. No, not the biggest platform. We’re aware that we’re not even a blip on the radar in this whole crisis, but our voices are loud and we’re going to use them. Right now Australia is the canary in the coal mine and we are dying while the whole world is watching. And we don’t want to die. We ALL want to breath clean air. We ALL want the tap to run with clean water when we turn it on. We ALL want the tap to run full stop. We want clean waterways and clean, green bushland. We all want our animals thriving and our summers free from endless natural disasters. We ALL want a future so why are we fighting? This deadly summer is surely a catalyst for us all to start seeing eye to eye on a future we can all agree on. We don’t want this to be our present, we definitely don’t want this to be our future but we have to act now.”
 
“We wrote the whole song in about an hour and recorded it live the next day in our apartment in Melbourne. We mixed it over the next couple of days and then it was done. We wanted to keep this one raw and pretty simple so we didn’t mess around with it too much. For us, this one is all about the message. Making the music video was especially hard though. Piecing together the footage was brutal and very upsetting and there were a few times when we thought it was too much, but it’s the reality of the situation and people need to face it, no matter how confronting.”
 
GREAT DIVING RAGE will be an independent, stand alone single for The Gooch Palms with a new album set for release in the coming months.
 
The pair will be debuting their new track live at shows around the country, starting tonight, as main support for UK legends The Stranglers.
 

Tour Dates:
WED 5 FEB – ASTOR THEATRE, PERTH *
FRI 7 FEB – THE FORUM, MELBOURNE *
SAT 8 FEB – ENMORE THEATRE, SYDNEY *
SUN 9 FEB – THE TIVOLI, BRISBANE *
TUE 11 FEB – THE GOV, ADELAIDE *
SAT 4 APR – SOUND STATION MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL, NEWCASTLE (AA / FREE)
* Supporting The Stranglers (UK)
 

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